Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / We live in a culture that depends on technologies to record our behavior and coordinate our actions with billions of other connected people. In this computational culture, humans and machines continue to perpetuate deep-seated injustices. Our abilities to observe and intervene in other people's lives also allow us to govern, forcing us to ask how to govern wisely and who should be responsible. In this dissertation, I argue that to govern wisely, we need to remake large-scale social experiments to follow values of democracy. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I spent time with hundreds of communities on the social news platform reddit and learned how they govern themselves. I designed CivilServant, novel experimentation software that communities have used to evaluate how they govern harassment and misinformation. Finally, I examined the uses of this evidence in community policy deliberation. As we develop ways to govern behavior through technology platforms, we have an opportunity to ensure that that the benefits will be enjoyed, questioned, and validated widely in an open society. Despite common views of social experiments as scarce knowledge that consolidates the power of experts, I show how community experiments can scale policy evaluation and expand public influence on the governance of human and machine behavior. / by J. Nathan Matias. / Ph. D.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages [100]-105). / Pictures play an important role in aiding literacy development amongst children. Present day educational apps for children take advantage of pictures in an instructionst manner - such as a flashcard, drag-and-drop, or fill-in-the-blanks approach. However, research indicates that following a constructionist approach rather than instructionst, where children actively construct meaningful projects playfully, leads to better engagement and learning. It is also universally established that children across the world enjoy creating and drawing pictures as a means of self-expression. Despite the evidence from the literature and the data, there is a lack of constructionist approaches towards picture-based learning apps for children. The goals of this thesis are two-fold: 1. Successfully design and evaluate a picture-based, constructionist literacy learning app in order to address this gap. 2. Explore the unique affordances/implications that this exploratory approach has on children's self-expression and learning. This app is called PictureBlocks, and it is designed for children between the ages of 5-9 years. The design of PictureBlocks is refined through several rounds of playtesting. Finally, a 15-day pilot study conducted in children's homes helps evaluate the app's design. Data analysis and findings also establish unique affordances and future implications for picture-based, constructionist learning apps. / by Sneha Priscilla Makini. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-200). / Due to advances in design generation and digital fabrication, novice designers are able to access more and more tools to bring their visions to life. As materials begin to evolve and change shape, having a set of rules with which to evaluate, interpret, and design them will become increasingly important. In moving towards tools that allow us to design and create our own materials these the two worlds of creation and curation must be (re)connected: in this work I strive to quantify and understand the emotive aspects of materials, such as haptic responses to, cognitive evaluation of, and emotive perception of materials; in order to understand how materials communicate meaning. My aim is to produce a set of guidelines that enable designers and scientists to communicate and help creators understand the implications of emerging material combinations. For those without the resources to conduct time intensive user studies for every project and without the intuitive knowledge of a professional, it can be very difficult to predict the implications of materials and their impact on the interaction. In this thesis, a repeatable methodology for exploring these impacts was implemented and evaluated. As a result, it will be possible to create a holistic material selection process. By combining materials to maximize properties, I plan to go beyond existing databases and fabricate objects designed to evoke specific reactions. Developing an effective methodology would enable fabrication of more engaging objects. Through this research, I plan to establish guidelines and provide a common language that enables designers to influence materials development and connect designers and researchers in a more effective way than is currently possible. This will promote unique research of materials and expand their range of use. Such a tool will enable new design practices by adding emotive factors that are not rigorously understood to the material selection and fabrication process. At its core, materials science is the study of how the structure and processing of materials impact the properties of compounds. I plan to help designers and scientists go one step further, and use material combinations to connect directly with the end user. / by Bianca C. Datta. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 130-131). / The Mark IV holographic video display, created by Daniel Smalley in the Object-Based Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, generates a three-dimensional image by illuminating a guided wave acousto-optic modulator, upon which is written a multiplexed acoustic hologram, with red, green, and blue lasers. Despite remarkable gains attained during Mark IV's inception, the reconstructed images still possess undesirable aberrations. This work's chief aim is to mitigate these aberrations by replacing many of the current optical elements with higher-end components through the aid of optical software modeling. Modeling of the optical setup is performed with a raytracing software package called FRED. Given that Mark IV's original reflector is not a high-precision optical element, the light that reflects off of its surface produces images that are distorted both horizontally and vertically at the viewing screen. To decrease the aberrations, several differently shaped reflectors are created in the model, and the coherent point spread function of the rays that pass through the image plane is analyzed. Additionally, the polygon mirror's horizontal scanning and the galvanometer's vertical scanning are simulated to generate point spread functions over the area of the image plane. And by further measuring the aberrations and computing the corresponding point spread functions at a variety of depths, the resolution is characterized across a view volume. Based on these FRED simulations, a reflector with high resolution and point spread functions that exhibit a tight concentration of energy is purchased to replace the original one. / by Andrew S. MacInnes. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 95-97). / of a framework for computer mediated expression. The computer's role in mediation is dual-both for enabling new forms of creative work as well as enabling creative work for populations for which it is not currently accessible, with the latter being the main focus of the work. The system consists of input, processing, and output stages. Simplicity of integration and modularity are the primary design goals which inform the architecture for the processing stage as well as the need for the interface layers to be universal and simple. Several input modalities have been realized and tested, including wearable IMU, airflow, and eye-tracking. One primary output modality has been constructed in the form of a robotic multi-color airbrush. Several evaluations were performed to assess the system's usability from a user's perspective as well as that of a developer. A survey was also conducted to evaluate the potential impact on the general publics perception of ability in the context of disability, particularly with respect to self-expression with paint. / by Tal Achituv. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "September 2018." / Includes bibliographical references. / News has been criticised for being fake and promoting echo-chambers. At the same time, spatial technologies have become more accessible, enabling affordable virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) systems. These systems enable a new channel for interfaces and content. Can these technologies establish a connection between space and news, resulting in a stronger connection between viewers and the news? We address these questions by building tools for news production and content consumption that use spatial technology. Through user-tests we show that spatial-organization of news information can result in greater news exposure. We evaluate spatial production tools by creating three live-broadcasts in VR and comparing them to broadcasts done by a production team. We also show that users have a bimodal response to 2.5D videos shown in AR. This thesis presents and evaluates a series of interactive spatial experiences to address the potential for spatial technologies for media-based journalism. / by Hisham Bedri. / S.M.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 159-166). / Data is a powerful lens for learning about the world. Driven by advances in computational technologies and methods that make it easier to collect, store, and analyze vast amounts of data about our world, data science has emerged as a new discipline with immense possibilities for discovery and learning. However, these possibilities are primarily accessible for adult experts - in this thesis, I examine pathways to support children as data scientists. In the first part of this thesis, I study children's use of variables and lists in the Scratch programming environment. I quantitatively study the ways in which children use variables and lists in Scratch (e.g., to keep score in games), as well as factors that foster this engagement. I find support for the theory that children learn to use data-structures through remixing their peers' works, as well through looking at source code of projects created by their peers. I also find evidence to suggest that providing more powerful uses of data-structures (such as data-persistence) leads to children using more data structures overall. In the second part of the thesis, I introduce a new system, Scratch Community Blocks, that enables children to create projects that access and analyze data from the Scratch online community (e.g., creating visualizations that show which programming blocks they used in their projects or analyzing trends in the popularity of their projects within the community). Through artifact-based case studies, interviews, and survey responses collected from a group of children using the system, I show how children use data and programming to answer their own questions about learning and social behaviour within the Scratch community. I find that children use Scratch Community Blocks not only to create with data through stories and games, but also to think with data by engaging in self-reflection about their own learning and social participation, and through critical conversations about the role of data within the culture of the Scratch community. / by Sayamindu Dasgupta. / Ph. D.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / Optically transparent and structurally sound, glass has played a significant role in the evolution of product and architectural design across scales and disciplines, and throughout the ages. Glass processing methods - such as blowing, pressing, and forming - have aimed at achieving increased glass performance and functionality. Nonetheless, techniques and technologies enabling controlled tunability of its optical and mechanical properties at high spatial manufacturing resolution have remained an end without a means. This thesis presents GLASS II - a high fidelity, large-scale, additive manufacturing technology for optically transparent glass combined with demonstrations of novelty through a construction of fully transparent glass structures at architectural scale. The enabling technology builds upon previous research conducted at the Mediated Matter Group and introduces a fundamental restructuring of the platform's architecture and process control informed by the material properties and behaviors of silicate glass. The new manufacturing technology provides a digitally integrated thermal control system across the entire glass forming processes, combined with a novel 4-axis motion control system; enabling a high fidelity manufacturing process capable of producing glass structures with tunable yet predictable mechanical and optical properties. The material fundamentally drives how the machine is used, and in return, the machine can change how the glass is formed and used. In order to evaluate the full capability of this new manufacturing technology, a series of three-meter tall glass column structures were designed, engineered, manufactured, and constructed. Harnessing its optical transparency in conjunction with the spatial tunability of the material deposition across the full length of the column, geometry of each column is topologically optimized under the material constrains of the viscoelastic filament such that the result provides highly efficient structural performance as free standing columns while each layer of the printed glass acts as a lens and transforms the incoming light into spatial interactions of kaleidoscopic caustics. This large-scale multifunctional 3D printed glass structure, embodying a new mode of transparency in architecture, was exhibited in Italy for the first time during the Milan Design Week in April 2017. / by Chikara Inamura. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 103-116). / This thesis (1) characterizes the gender and skin type distribution of IJB-A, a government facial recognition benchmark, and Adience, a gender classification benchmark, (2) outlines an approach for capturing images with more diverse skin types which is then applied to develop the Pilot Parliaments Benchmark (PPB), and (3) uses PPB to assess the classification accuracy of Adience, IBM, Microsoft, and Face++ gender classifiers with respect to gender, skin type, and the intersection of skin type and gender. The datasets evaluated are overwhelming lighter skinned: 79.6% - 86.24%. IJB-A includes only 24.6% female and 4.4% darker female, and features 59.4% lighter males. By construction, Adience achieves rough gender parity at 52.0% female but has only 13.76% darker skin. The Parliaments method for creating a more skin-type-balanced benchmark resulted in a dataset that is 44.39% female and 47% darker skin. An evaluation of four gender classifiers revealed a significant gap exists when comparing gender classification accuracies of females vs males (9 - 20%) and darker skin vs lighter skin (10 - 21%). Lighter males were in general the best classified group, and darker females were the worst classified group. 37% - 83% of classification errors resulted from the misclassification of darker females. Lighter males contributed the least to overall classification error (.4% - 3%). For the best performing classifier, darker females were 32 times more likely to be misclassified than lighter males. To increase the accuracy of these systems, more phenotypically diverse datasets need to be developed. Benchmark performance metrics need to be disaggregated not just by gender or skin type but by the intersection of gender and skin type. At a minimum, human-focused computer vision models should report accuracy on four subgroups: darker females, lighter females, darker males, and lighter males. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the implications of misclassification and the importance of building inclusive training sets and benchmarks. / by Joy Adowaa Buolamwini. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 85-91). / Measuring the mechanical properties of soft tissue can be an important method to detect pathology. Concerning the brain in particular, correlation between abnormal tissue stiffness and morbidity has been reported for Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and brain tumors, among others. On a more fundamental level, the nature and behavior of the brain from a mechanical standpoint is relatively understudied, in comparison to those from the chemical, electromagnetic and optical perspective. Current techniques fall into two main categories: one establishes direct contact to measure the deformation of tissue under various mechanical loads, the other solves the inverse problem based on the tissue displacement data collected through a number of imaging modalities. Both categories, however, have their limitations in providing ideal mechanical measurement of the brain, ranging from form factor compatibility, spatiotemporal resolution and accuracy. In this light, this work aims at developing an implantable measurement device that can bypass these limitations and provide in situ, in vivo, real-time, long-term monitoring of soft tissue biomechanics. The initial goal is to create a functional sensor front-end that can differentiate materials of different stiffness. As this project is to continue beyond the thesis, this thesis will present the current development progress, issues encountered and corresponding counter-measures, and discuss the prospective work in the future. / by Zijun Wei. / S.M.