At any given time, the Media Design Program is running a series of research projects. Projects take place in the classroom, the N.E.T. Lab, and off campus.
Each summer, the MDP hosts two research teams for 14 weeks total. (There will be three projects in 2010.) The MDP provides studio space, technology, a stipend, a budget for materials, and graduate student research interns. Each year, one project is run by an MDP faculty member and the other is run by visiting researcher/s whose proposal is selected by a jury. A Call for Proposals is posted in January of each year.


Summer Research Residency 2011
Visiting Residency: Learning and the New Ecology of Things
Telematic Tales
Principal Investigator: Kjen Wilkens

Telematic Tales will explore how the internet of things might be used in teaching story-telling to film students. What if we take away the film camera and replace it with sensor-enabled devices? These devices would record e.g. their own position, acceleration or the temperature around them. What will those stories feel like? How are we going to experience those stories?

Summer Research Residency 2011
Micro Meta Mega
Principal Investigators: Anne Burdick

Micro Meta Mega is a design-driven inquiry into the future of humanities research and scholarly production. Through the creation of speculative environments and interfaces, the project aims to provide an alternative to the information environments envisioned through popular media and corporate promotions that tend to emphasize military, scientific, and business applications.

Summer Research Residency 2011
Object Animism, sponsored by Nokia Research
Principal Investigators: Phil Van Allen

Object Animism explores the design opportunities in objects that seem to have inner lives through their expressive behavior. As Piaget and others have noted, people tend to imagine that inanimate objects are alive - why not leverage this to create more interesting, playful, expressive, desirable, and useful systems? Creating apparent intentionality for objects offers the potential for fitting more easily into the narrative of daily life, as well as making it easier for people to understand the sometimes complex function and role of digital systems in our lives.

Media Design Fellowship 2011
Daniel Lara

“Chair 2.0 / Sitting 1.9” is a design research project about assessing sitting culture in the dawn of a fully interconnected world, with the hopes of finding new possibilities away from the ubiquitous desktop model.

The research has two anchors, ACTIVE SITTING (where the brain is the whole body) and PASSIVE SITTING (where the brain is incased within the skull) . These poles push against each other to create a thinking space for the paradox of a world saturated with media that demands mind-hyperactivity and a chair to sit down.

Summer Research Residency 2010
FRIENDS OF FRIENDS OF FRIENDS (starts May 2010)
Principal Investigators: Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen

Summer Research Residency 2010
Visiting Residency: "made up"
SUPERCALIFORNIA (starts May 2010)
Principal Investigator: Sascha Pohflepp
Making visible the values and visions behind technoscientific futures.

SUPERCALIFORNIA will employ alternate history design narratives to explore the implications of technoscientific visions in the past and the present, with a focus on California and its exceptionally rich and often unknown history ranging from utopian settlements, forgotten energy projects to the colonization of space. It will include collaborations with institutions that are keeping records of such projects. We will visit some of these, identify a range of projects and look closer at the circumstances which have made them a reality or not. The goal is not to create technocratic fantasies, but to critically look at the way that technology is being envisioned, created and adopted in our world.

In the second step, we will 'make up' a reality where they did flourish and create objects in a wide range of media to flesh out these alternate versions of the world. The tangible results of our process, which might be pieces of writing by ourselves and guests, materialized objects as well as collaged still and moving images will be assembled into what might take the shape of a ‘catalog of lost futures’. The research and general progress of the project will be documented throughout on the SUPERCALIFORNIA blog.

Summer Research Residency 2010
Visiting Residency: "made up"
Suspension of Disbelief (starts July 2010)
Principal Investigators: Ingrid Hora and Daniel Salomon
Objects have a tremendous importance in our lives. They are not only useful; they mean something to us. Sometimes we are sentimentally attached to them, we involve them in daily rituals or superstitiously hold on to them. Sometimes they can trigger physical attraction. There are many examples of paraphilias involving objects. Nowadays more liberal mores and the Internet makes it possible for practitioners of a specific fetish to form true communities. Thus you'll find strong communities of balloon fetishists or people in love with buildings.

Consumerism is another form of object fetishism. Marketers create a mystique around their products to trigger our irrational consumption. We buy specific commodities or brands to show ourselves and others that we belong to a specific community based on social class or other cultural references. We basically build our identity through objects.

Observing these phenomena we have concluded that our relationship to objects involves faith. Objects carry stories and in order for them to "work" we need to believe in them. From there we decided to go one step further: for our MDP Summer Research Residency we will instigate a new cult based on the worship of objects. We will produce shrines, icons, altars, merchandising items and more technological and interactive machines, which will be needed to accomplish peculiar rituals.

New Ecology of Things (ongoing)
Principal Investigator: Phil van Allen
The New Ecology of Things (NET) is an ongoing research initiative to explore emerging forms of interactive communication brought about by pervasive networked technologies. The project began as a studio class sponsored by Sun Microsystems Labs and has evolved into a conceptual model, a forum for discussion, an ongoing series of projects, technological inventions, and new issues for design pedagogy.
Research Sponsors: Sun Microsystems Labs, Art Center Faculty Enrichment Fund. Research Partner: MOTO Development Group.

Summer Research Residency 2009
Futures: New Models for Building Interfaces as Fiction (completed 2009)
Principal Investigator: Norman Klein
The Imaginary Twentieth Century Novel and Digital Archive
All media, for thousands of years, rely on carefully designed “spaces between” to tell story. How might this idea be embodied in tangible form? What is an absence within the computer? What "holes" in the way computers operate can be turned into mental "interactive" story? Over the course of the project, our discourse shifted increasingly toward four issues-- then projects that responded to these: (1) interpretive mapping as fiction; (2) research as a journey, as a designed interface; (3) the space between print media, as in this novel, and the impact of the digital upon the reading of print; (4) Other applications of "space between" (defined as a visual gap that forces the reader to mentally process a narrative) -- how spaces-between were generated in the late nineteenth century (in book design, in print media), then imagining how these might be redesigned for our era, for our unique moment.

Summer Research Residency 2009
Redesigning the Media Designer's Affordances (completed 2009)
Principal Investigator: Phil van Allen, MDP Core Faculty
How can a designer's workspace and tools be remade to take full advantage of physical and digital affordance in a New Ecology of Things context? The project explores the media designer's affordances in computational (displays, sensors, tangible interfaces, networks, etc.) objects, spaces, and systems. Tools and their associated interactions are simulated and evaluated in terms of what they tell us about affordance. As the research progressed, it moved beyond the activity of creating a final outcome--which has been the focus of digital tools such as Photoshop--and instead looked at the designer's overall practice. From sketching to collaboration to documentation to new ways of organizing and visualizing projects, the project asks how computation might be used to move the designer's work environment beyond the traditions of the mouse, computer screen, and office metaphors.

From Hi-fi to Lo-fi: Sharing digital-born stories in the developing world (completed 2008)
Principal Investigator: Peter Cho
Part of Designmatters at Art Center, this project addresses the multi-faceted design challenges of UNICEF’s Story-Sharing Software Project (SSSP). The primary objective will be to develop tools and techniques for sharing stories in communities where high-bandwidth video upload and download are not feasible. This project will be run as a transdisciplinary studio in the Spring 2008.
MDP Research Associate: Miya Osaki. Research Sponsor: ACCD’s Design Matters and UNICEF. Research Partners: UNICEF, mDialog.

2008 Visionary-in-Residence
Biggest Visual Power Show(completed 2008)
Project Leads: Mieke Gerritzen and Koerte van Meenswort
The Visual Power Show is an intellectual show whose subject is the image in our society. It is scheduled to take place in May 2008 with the theme NEXT NATURE. With this event we seek to make a creative contribution to the discussion around visual culture and the influence of media, technology and economy on the image.
Project Sponsor: Dutch Fonds

Living Profiles (completed 2008)
Living Profiles is one of nine teams in Project HealthDesign, an 18-month research project to prototype the personal health record of the future in order to influence U.S. national health policy towards open source standards. Living Profiles explores ways to empower teens with chronic health conditions to better manage their own health and well-being during transition from pediatric care to adult medicine. The research has led to a combination of real-time streaming data tools, ambient technology, and an interface that aggregates data into a teen-specific Quality-of-Life Timeline. www.projecthealthdesign.org/
Principal Investigator: Lisa Nugent. MDP Research Associates: Sean Donahue, Tina Park, Phil van Allen. Research Sponsor: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Research Partners: Stanford University School of Medicine, Children's Hospital of Orange County, and MOTO Development Group. ACCD Research Interns: Laura Janisse, Luke Johnson, Mari Nakano, Hannah Regier, Amy Sheppard, Peter Shultz, Julia Tsao.

The Mediawork Project (completed 2007)
An award-wining transmedia publishing initiative, the Mediawork project transforms private theory into public discourse, media experimentation into cultural intervention. Authors include Brenda Laurel, N. Katherine Hayles, Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky, Bruce Sterling, Peter Lunenfeld, and designers Denise Gonzales Crisp, Anne Burdick, COMA Amsterdam/New York, Lorraine Wild, and Mieke Gerritzen.www.mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork/
Principal Investigator: Peter Lunenfeld. Research Sponsor: Rockefeller Foundation, Jeffrey and Catharine Soros, Art Center College of Design. MDP Research Associate: Anne Burdick. ACCD Research Intern: Christopher Ward. Research Partner: The MIT Press.

Impact: Ford Foundation (completed 2007)
Principal Investigator: Sean Donahue

Earthquake Research (completed 2007)
Principal Investigator: Sean Donahue