. .
S P R I N G E V E N T S C A L E N D A R I N S I D E , P A G E 2 3
In Medias Res Comparative Media Studies | Writing
 
 3  T O O U R R E A D E R S
  In Medio Nix   Edward Schiappa
 4  FEATURE
 6 FEATURE
Louisa Rosenheck
 9 INTERVIEW
Documentaries, MIT-Style
10 NEWS
Creating User-Friendlier
18 PEOPL E , PLACES , THI NGS
Personal and Project Updates
Spring 2015 Talks 
tions with the term gamer though, many
people probably would not want to admit
that they prioritize games over other aspects
of life. Video games have existed for decades,
they’re the largest entertainment industry in
the world, and many people now make their
living playing games, yet somehow we still
have not legitimized games as a past ime.”
 —Jesse Sell, p. 5 
 you make a film, a radio story, a televi sion
show, etc. Today, digital documentaries
are informed by games, civic engagement,
activism, artificial intelligence, and creative
computing.”
is having a cadre of people who are able to
lead the development of new legal and social
frameworks for dealing with the ambiguity
and contingencies brought about by a new
technology.”
blizzard snow pile behind Simmons Hall.
 —Photo by Tom Gearty, featured by Spectrum,
a publication of the MIT Office of Resource
Development: http://spectrum.mit.edu/ 
“ S P R I N G ” 2 0 1 5
Comparative Media Studies|Writing
MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Sasha Costanza-Chock , Center for Civic Media
Kurt Fendt, HyperStudio
Professional Communication
 
Jessica Tatlock 
cmsw.mit.edu/people
 

Or So Far, “In Medio Nix”  By Edward Schiappa, Head of Comparative Media Studies/Writing 
G  reetings!
area is dealing with one of its
snowiest winters in history,
including MIT. As this i ssue of In Medias Res
testifies, however, the challenging weather
has not slowed the pace of activities of the
denizens of CMS/W!
number of our faculty are away on sabbati-
cals and leaves. As a result, we have decided
to postpone our biennial Media in Transition
conference for one year, but look forward to
organizing it for spring 2016. We also look
forward to telling you all about the accom-
plishments of our faculty on leave when
everyone returns this fall.
continues to be enormously popular with
MIT undergraduates, and the role of games
in society continues to be reflected upon by
faculty and graduate students as well, as the
essay by Jesse Sell (CMS ’15) illustrates.
Carole Urbano and Philip Tan then tell
us about the role of Education Arcade and
MIT Game Lab in the launch of the first
two courses of EdTechX, a series of massive
open online courses (MOOCs) dedicated to
the subject of educational technology. Their
narrative illustrates the enormous amount of
work that goes into the creation of MOOCs,
and they provide a candid account of what
didn’t quite work and what worked splen-
didly.
research groups are the Open Documentary
Lab (ODL) and the Mobile Experience Lab
(MEL). ODL is directed by Sarah Wolozin
with Professor William Uricchio as Principal
Investigator. Nancy DuVergne Smith of the
MIT Alumni Association sat down with
Wolozin to talk about the “Moments of In-
novation” website, co-constructed with the
International Documentary Festival of Am-
sterdam’s Doclab (p. 9).
MEL is directed by Associate Professor of
the Practice Federico Casalegno. As Steve
Calechman’s article demonstrates, MEL is at
the forefront of explore the design of tech-
nology aimed at enhancing people’s experi-
ences of locations we typical ly experience on
a transitory basis, such as a gas station, res-
taurant, or hotel lobby. If you want to see the
future of such places, then you should check
out what MEL is up to! (p. 10)
Chelsea Barabas (CMS ’15) tells us about
her trip over MIT’s Independent Activities
Period to Kenya, where she and graduate
student Jude Mwenda (MAS, ’15) worked
with wi ldlife conservancies to conduct a fea-
sibility study for the use of drone technologies
to support anti-poaching activities. Barabas
and Mwenda conducted a series of workshops
with wildlife conservation workers and local
communities bordering wildlife parks in
order to understand the challenges they face
in deploying drone technologies in a sustain-
able way. The goal of their trip was to identif y
the sort of support needed for drones to be a
sustainable component of Kenyan conserva-
tion efforts (p. 12).
affiliated with CMS/W. The breadth of ac-
tivities going on here is great.
Throughout the spring semester, CMS/W
hosts an impressive series of guest speakers
engaging topics as varied as comic books to
hate crimes in cyberspace. Some highlights
include our MLK Visiting Scholar Coco
Fusco, who will preview her fall 2015 book
on “performance and politics in Cuba” on
the role of the state in Cuban art during the
1980s; Kevin Driscoll, who locates the roots
of social media as we think of it in the bulletin
board systems of the early web; and Thomas
DeFranz on queer social dance in African-
American communities. We’re particularly
excited to have Driscoll and DeFranz here:
both have roots at CMS/W, with Driscoll
a 2009 graduate of our Comparative Media
Studies master’s program and DeFranz a
former MIT professor affiliated with us
before his departure for Duke in 2011. See
p. 23 for a full list of thi s spring’s events, and
 join us if you can.
T O O U R R E A D E R S
“As I write this, the Boston area is dealing with one of its
snowiest winters in history, with blizzard conditions shutting
down mass transit and closing schools and universities,
including MIT. As this issue of In Medias Res testifies,
however, the challenging weather has not slowed the pace of
activities of the denizens of CMS/W!” 
 

 
Gamer Identity 
 Jesse Sell, CMS ’15
R  ecently in a course I’m assisting, I asked the students to
go around the room and choose which one of Richard
Bartle’s player types1 they identify most strongly with.
Bartle’s types include the achiever, the explorer, the
killer, and the socializer. The article focuses particularly on Multiple
User Dungeons, but the player types are easily applicable to almost
any variety of game.
Achievers are the type of people to go through a g ame with the goal
of completing everything the game has to offer. If there is an award to
be won, the achiever is going after it. Explorers a re inclined to com-
petitiveness and spend their time finding the outer edges of the game.
Easter eggs and secrets are paydirt for explorers. Killers are exactly
what they sound like. Closely related to griefers, they spend their time
hunting down other players, preying on the “weaker” types. Finally,
the socializer s are those players who spend their time chatting with or
helping others. They may be a knowledgebase for the other players, or
they may simply enjoy spending time with others instead of seeking
their own rewards.
As the exercise unfolded, the entire class identified most strongly
with the achiever role, with a few leaning towards the explorer role.
Not a single student identified themselves as a killer or a socializer.
After some more questioning a few students admitted to inhabit-
ing either of those roles when the mood suited them, but still, none
strayed from the path of the achiever for very long. Whether the resu lt
of the exercise was a byproduct of having a class full of MIT students
or if most people just identify more with the achiever role is impos-
sible for me to tell. The fascinating part, though, is that I knew several
of the students don’t typical ly play video games, yet they all were able
1 Bartle, Richard (1996) Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades. Players who suit MUDs. Journal
of MUD Research. Vol. 1 (1), June 1996.
to identify their player type quickly and easily. I was intrigued and
decided to keep digging. “By a show of hands, how many of you play
video games?” A ll but a few hands went up. “Okay, how many of you
consider yourselves to be gamers?” Only a small handful of students
kept their hands in the air. Interesting.
So what, then, does gamer  mean? It clearly isn’t just “one who plays
games”. It is much more complicated than that . It comes with a whole
set of characterist ics that aren’t easy to pinpoint. It’s the classic “know
it when you see it” identification. With issues like #gamergate2 and
other re-defining moments in the video game industry, it is time we
look at the term gamer and either discard it or reshape it.
I’ve long held the opinion that anyone who plays a game is a gamer.
It’s been a matter of inclusion for me. I want the term gamer to be
less strange. If more people identify as gamers, it somehow validates
my own longtime gamer identification. After speaking with this class
though, I had to change how I define gamer.
Take a moment to think of what gamer means to you.
So, is gamer a negative term? More than l ikely, you’ve conjured up
a very particular image in your head. What are some of the charac-
teristics there? We can toss out the negative stereotypes right away:
antisocial, dependent, detached, lazy, and perhaps even misogynistic.
Those are some of the words that I associate with gamer, yet as a
gamer I would argue that I’m nothing like that. I would also say that
the vast majority of people I play games with are nothing like that.
In fact, most of the players I know are inventive problem-solvers who
care a lot about other people. As far as I’ve noticed, that a rchetypical
image is very rare yet the word gamer stil l holds that stigma. If we toss
out all of those negative stereotypes, though, would more people self-
identify as gamers? I doubt it.
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy

 
F E A T U R E
Even with the realization that the stereotypes are pretty fa r off-base
(as stereotypes tend to be), there is still a deep-seated negat ive associa-
tion with the term gamer. I’d argue that this negativity comes from
the medium itself. The industry has been associated with misogyny
for quite a long time at this point. #gamergate churned up a huge
amount of animosity around gender in the video games industry. The
industry does not have the best track record when it comes to the rep-
resentation of anything outside the realm of white, male hegemony.
It’s very slowly getting better, but #gamergate shows the impetus for
more change. For a long time, the argument has been that games are
“for boys, by boys”. It’s long past time to throw this argument out.
Almost everybody plays g ames, so it’s time that everyone has a chance
to both make and be seen in games. Some people discard the fact that
most people (men, women, and other) play games as irrelevant by
saying something a long the lines of, “yeah everybody plays games, but
they aren’t real gamers.” What’s a real gamer though?
That statement typically sets the stage for the creation of a
dichotomy between “casual” and “hardcore” games, as if somehow
one game is more canonical in the gaming world. Nothing irks me
quite as much as this separation, especial ly considering it’s almost im-
possible to actually distinguish “hardcore” and “casual” games when
 you actual ly sit down and try. Hopeful ly people are spending their
free time doing whatever they want to do. To argue that anyone can
spend time playing games “harder” than someone else is just ludicrous.
Is someone participating in a four-hour raid in World of Warcraft
somehow more legitimate than someone spending their four-hour
plane ride crushing some candy? No. I also wouldn’t argue that both
of these people are gamers though.
One student in class posited that a gamer is anyone who prioritizes
games. I find this definition to be perfect. We often use this same logic
when referring to other pastimes: movie buff, quilter, bird watcher,
sports fan. While it might not be fair to apply these labels to people
without their consent, they definitely do not come with the same
negativity.
Even without all the negative associations with the term gamer
though, many people probably would not want to admit that they pri-
oritize games over other aspects of life. Video games have existed for
decades, they’re the largest entertainment industry in the world, and
many people now make their living playing games, yet somehow we
stil l have not legitimized games as a pastime. They’re so fundamental-
ly similar to sports to have evoked the term e-sport s, but most parents
would be happy to let their child participate in a soccer or volleyball
tournament for an entire weekend but would get upset to th ink their
child might spend that same amount of time playing v ideo games. It’s
not my place to argue for or against the legitimacy of sports-playing
(physical fitness and socializing being just two of many examples in
support of sports), but I would argue that as a pastime, video games
are incredibly similar. Perhaps it’s just a matter of time before we start
to see video games alongside sports as legitimate pastimes. Until then,
the term gamer wi ll continue to be a problematic identity.
It might instead be bet ter to get rid of the term gamer altogether. Its
long history may be too hard to wipe away. As more people continue
to play games, perhaps other (less problemat ic) terms will emerge. The
industry continues to grow every year without signs of stopping, so as
I mentioned earlier, it might just be a matter of time before the legiti-
macy of gaming wipes away the stigma of the term gamer.
 A version of this pi ece fir st appea red in November on the MIT Game Lab blog: http:// 
 gamelab.mit.edu/gamer-identity/ 
Images
https://www.flickr.com/photos/16865302@N00/393152033/ 
http://www.wtfgamersonly.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/I-Love-Gaming.jpg 
http://hntb.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/gamer.jpg 
 
EdTechX
Philip Tan, Eric Klopfer, and Louisa Rosenheck
T  he Scheller Teacher Education Program, The Education
Arcade, and the MIT Game Lab recently launched the
first two courses in EdTechX, a series of massively open
online courses (MOOCs) focused on educational technol-
ogy. Both MITx courses, 11.132x Design and Development of Edu-
cational Technology and 11.126x Introduction to Game Design, were
developed on the EdX platform. Of the over 40,000 combined regis-
trants, approximately seven percent or 3,000 students earned certifi-
cates for their participation.
For those of us involved in designing these courses, the story goes
far beyond earning certificates. We wanted to push the envelope of
what was possible. Since these were new courses, we had a blank sl ate
from which to work rather than transferring a residential version of
an MIT course to the digital environment. We maintained a deep
commitment to replicate the interactive, collaborative, and intimate
environment of our typical small, project-based courses delivered
on campus. But how exactly do you build and support that sort of
learning and community in massive online courses?
Our solution included several specific instructional design decisions
to support elements we considered critical to the learning process —
student and community engagement, student-constructed knowledge,
and collaboration. Of course, we also made many mistakes along the
way, which allows us to apply further refinements to our next two
courses in 2015.
Student Engagement
In face-to-face classes, it can be challenging to know whether you
are engaging students. We often have to rely on subtleties like facial
expressions and sitting postures to provide valuable feedback to an
instructor. How do you determine whether you are succeeding in
reaching students that you cannot see or interact with in real-time?
We needed to create different opportunities for actively engaging
students throughout the course, starting with the primary medium
of the MOOC: streaming video. To lay the foundation for student
interaction, we settled on three primary forms of video-based content
 — interv iew style, act ion or demonstrat ion-based videos, and activ ity
breaks.
Interviews borrowed from the visual language of celebrity talk
shows. We took advantage of our access to many of the pioneering
voices in our fields and worked through foundational concepts right
on camera. Instead of telling students everything we knew about a
topic, they could hear reasoning and rationale from the horse’s mouth.
Edited into five- to ten-minute segments, these informal and infor-
mational clips subtly suggested to students that knowledge doesn’t
need to come from one authoritative voice, and that there is room
for different perspectives, approaches, and philosophies to work
together. Demonstration videos took on more of a how-to vibe, not
unlike children’s science television and YouTube cooking channels.
 

The instructors would not only introduce assignments and goals, but
also demonstrate how they would tackle a sample problem. In one
clip, Sara Verrilli and Philip Tan designed a board game in under ten
minutes in front of the camera, and concluded the segment by chal-
lenging the students to do the same. These think-aloud videos aimed
to reduce the anxiety of getting started by showing how even instruc-
tors can make mistakes. The presenters continuously talk through
their process and decision-making, setting student expectations by
demonstrating what rea sonable effort and success might look like.
Every video series was punctuated by an activity break. In Design
and Development of Educational Technology, one activit y break en-
couraged students to stop the video, try their hand at juggling, and
reflect on what it felt like to take on the role of the learner. This
gave students the room to explicitly contemplate the learning theory
distinct from the technologies. Other activity breaks afforded students
the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with and consider
possible applications of the tools and technologies — exploring and
manipulating motion graphs with SimCalc1, experimenting and
exploring using simulations with tools like PhET Science Sims 2,
Molecular Workbench3, and StarLogo Nova4.
Community Building
Learning is an inherently social process — we learn by explaining to
our peers, challenging other ideas, and being challenged by others. The
physical classroom presents opportunit ies for students and teachers to
interact in these ways, forging peer and student-teacher relationships.
 Yet, these types of exper iences are not often baked into MOOCs;
many students experience online instruction in isolation. Seeing the
social aspects of learning as crit ical to the process, we sought to create
better student interact ions in forums and live events to create a more
intimate experience for students, creating an environment to increase
the quantity and quality of peer interactions.
In the early weeks of both courses, the lead faculty — Eric Klopfer
and Philip Tan — conducted Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions on
Reddit. AMA participants were able to get a feel for the faculty and
how the course might go whi le also meeting some of their classmates.
Both sessions helped to spark peer interactions and model respectful
communication among prospective participants.
To support a d iverse student body, in terms of geography, technical
expertise, bandwidth, etc., we needed to build a broad event and
social media infrastructure. We wanted to support students within
their technological comfort zone while introducing a broader range
of possible technology tools that could enhance ongoing collaborat ion
and contribute to a sense of community.
The Design and Development of Educational Technology team
held a number of live events using various technology tools spaced
evenly throughout the course. These events were delivered on
different technologies including Talkabout, Google Hangouts on Ai r,
1 http://math.sri.com/technology/index.html 
2 http://phet.colorado.edu
3 http://mw.concord.org 
4 http://www.slnova.org 
and Unhangout. This al lowed participants to evaluate the benefits and
challenges associa ted with the tools and provided them with opportu-
nities to interact with each other and with the course team.
The Introduction to Game Design team presented live video in the
form of broadcast on Twitch.tv, mirroring the practices of the gaming
community. While attendance at these events was promising, sched-
uling for the real-time events were defined by staff working hours
in the US Eastern Time Zone, limiting live participation from the
global student population and forcing them to rely on online archives
instead.
community development. Student-created social media pages and
hashtags are a mainstay of the MOOC experience, so we created
official pages on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and Google+, al lowing
participants to communicate with fellow students through media that
they found more familiar. Introduction to Game Design participants
created an internet relay chat channel to support each other on the use
of GameBlox as a development tool. Staff did not monitor or moderate
these vehicles heavily but occasionally participated in them to guide
students back to the course forums, where the team could focused
our efforts to build community and support student interaction and
collaboration.
the principles of project-based learning. We sought to create opportu-
nities for students to provide evidence of their learn ing and explore al-
ternative methods of grading over typical online quizzes. Each of the
activities and assignments throughout the two courses were designed
to provide students with incremental knowledge and skil ls required to
complete the summative course project.
For the Design and Development of Educational Technology, that
meant preparing students to create and deliver a Kickstarter-li ke pitch
about a new educational technology. Introduction to Game Design 
students created a digita l or tabletop game using iterative game design
processes. The projects not only provided an effective example of
the theories discussed in the classes. They also provided students
with a final goal. Weekly assignments all led to the summative final
project, allowing students to think through their projects each week
to integrate new course informat ion, peer feedback and questions.
The projects for these two courses may have been too large a scope
for students to handle in a short time frame. This was especially true
given the amount of theoretical and technical content students were
trying to process at the same time. Students were trying to incorpo-
rate new theories and best practices whi le having to become fluent in
new technologies. This tension created a level of frustration on the
part of students who were invested in completing the course with
an admirable portfolio. Despite these frustrations, there was an over-
whelming desire on the par t of students to continue to make progress
on their final projects. Many did complete them and gained valuable
experience from doing so.
Collaboration and Peer Review
The final component we rethought was collaboration and peer rev iew.
Both are critical instructional strategies of residential courses delivered
by the MIT Game Lab and Scheller Teacher Education Program. It
was important to design both the technical infra structure and the cur-
riculum to ensure a posit ive collaborative experience for students.
From a technical perspective, we spent significant energy identi-
fying the most effective forum and discussion tools for supporting
community interaction and conversation. We also had to find solutions
that would integrate easi ly with the EdX platform. We created a cus-
tomized student forum system based on open-source technologies
for both courses. The forum features seemed to work well overall,
providing opportunit ies for students to interact in groups, share course
artifacts, develop a personal profile, and highlight interesting work.
Many of the students who had taken other MOOCs commented on
the enhanced interactions provided by our forums.
Stil l, there is much more work to be done. Some students struggled
to make connections with others with similar interests, in nearby
locales, or with simi lar background knowledge and experience. There
were also typical technical hiccups with peer review — students in-
advertently submitting blank documents or inaccessible web links —
but we are most committed to improving the value of the feedback
provided to students.
In a MOOC, there are so many students that it is clearly not sustain-
able for the faculty, teaching as sistants and other members of the course
team to personally review and provide feedback on all submitted
work. It was a priority for the course teams to get peer review to
work well. We tried many different approaches from the start, such as
establishing guidelines and norms about providing effective feedback
on the course pages and modeling what feedback might look like in
the forums.
Despite this, many par ticipants received either no feedback on their
work or feedback of low value due the lack of comfort, experience,
knowledge, or context on the part of the reviewer. In an ideal world,
peer review allows students to help support each other as they acquire
and refine new knowledge and skills. As the courses progressed, it
became evident that there was a disparate range of familiarity and
experience with providing peer review among the course participants.
To help students become more adept at peer review, we increased
our modeling of providing constructive and supportive feedback
beyond the forums. The Design and Development of Educational
Technology course team hosted a Google Hangout on Air 5 in which
Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil and Jen Groff reflected on a few student
projects, asking probing questions to help students think about their
project, their goals, and possible refinements. The Introduction to
Game Design did the same with weekly videos. We shared standard
peer-review guidelines and discussed comments from the forums and
live chat to demonstrate examples of effective feedback.
Students were encouraged to create working and affinity groups
that might serve as their personal learning community. Several groups
were successful with members stepping up to serve as dedicated facil i-
tators, ensur ing that the group came together and stay on task. We are
currently studying the most successful groups to determine how to
better foster and support the behaviors that made them work.
We anticipate that building-in greater support for creating and
maintaining self-directed collaborative groups, combined with
enhanced modeling and supports for effective peer review, will resu lt
in fewer bland “Good job!” and “Fun game!” comments and more
insightful questions that help students consider their projects under a
new lens. This sort of reflection allows a student to make explicit and
deeper connections between the course content and their own work.
Design and Development of Educational Technology and Introduc-
tion to Game Design validated that project-based collaborative in-
struction can succeed in the virtual world. A subset of students were
deeply engaged and became integral members of a strong learning
community. We wil l continue to iterate and identify ways to scale that
positive experience for a larger percentage of students and make these
successes feel like core components of our courses. Coming up in the
EdTechX Series will be 11.127x Design and Development of Games
for Learning6, which starts April 1, 2015, and 11.133x Implementation
and Evaluation of Educational Technology, star ting in July, 2015.
5 http://mitsha.re/1zDgX2H 
6 http://mitsha.re/1zDhvWg 
Philip Tan and Sara Verilli model a paper prototyping exercise for 11.126x Introduction
to Game Design participants.
 

 
 
Documentaries, MIT-Style
Experience interactive, multimedia, immersive storytelling
Nancy DuVergne Smith, MIT Alumni Association, with Sarah Wolozin, Director of the Open Documentary Lab
T  elling real stories in interactive time is the MIT Open
Documentary Lab’s experimental turf. The lab brings
together storytellers, technologists, and scholars to invent
new storytell ing modes that focus on collaborat ive, inter-
active, and immersive forms. The research goal is to understand the
impact and evolution of such new story forms.
Documentaries are taking a creative leap thanks to influences such
as television, ubiquitous handheld cameras, user-generated content,
interactive documentary forms, and work that combines and crosses
media, according to William Uricchio, professor of Comparative
Media Studies, the program where OpenDocLab was founded in
2012. “The documentary field now is like looking at the first five to
eight years of television…new tools, new storytel ling techniques, new
participant s,” he said in an Great Ideas inter view. “It’s a very exciting
moment.”
 You can get a sense of the approach by vis iting Moments of In-
novation, an interactive whitepaper that descr ibes the long search for
immersive story experiences and highlights recurrent themes in docu-
mentaries.
Nancy DuVergne Smith: Why is MIT a good place to investigate
the future of storytelling?
Sarah Wolozin: The future of storytelling — and I would argue that
the future is here — is interdisciplinary and based on innovative
new uses of emerging technologies. Traditional storytelling is media
specific; you make a film, a radio story, a television show, etc., and
each has its own forms and processes. Today, digital documentaries
are informed by al l of these media as well as games, civic engagement,
activism, artificial intelligence, creative computing, to name a few.
MIT has researchers studying and experimenting in all of these areas
and innovation at MIT is based on an interdisciplinary approach. It
makes MIT a great place to incubate new storytelling projects, take
the time to reflect, collaborate across disciplines and shape the future
of storytelling.
NDS : What is the Moments of Innovation “docubase” and why is it
important?
SW : Moments of Innovation is a website we created together w ith the
Internationa l Documentary Festival of Amsterdam’s Doclab in honor
of their 5th  anniversary. It’s designed and developed by the French
company, Upian. And it’s based on Professor William Uricchio’s thesis
that today’s storytelling practices such as participation, interactivity,
and data v isualization are not new. They have long and rich histories;
people have always used the tools of the day to tell these kinds of
stories. Uricchio also argues that documentary has always been at the
forefront of innovation; documentarians were often the first to exper-
iment with new technologies. It makes sense because we all observe
the world around us and tell stories to make sense of it and some
people are driven to express it and can do so in a public way. What’s
exciting today is that public storytelling is more democratized than
ever before; the means of production and d istribution are in people’s
pockets or purses in the form of a cell phone.
Docubase is a database that aggregates and curates the innovation
taking place in documentary storytelli ng today and serves as a place of
inspiration and education about new documentary forms. According
to Uricchio, we are going through a major shift in documentary sto-
rytelling and Docubase is serving to archive these experiments for
posterity and encourage them.
Originally published at http://slice.mit.edu/2014/10/17/documentaries-mit-style 
 
Federico Casalegno designs technology environments that keep human experience at the center of user experience.
Steve Calechman, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
T  echnology is a two-headed monster. It can instantly
bring information to the most remote locations. But it
can also create a coffee shop full of people, starting at
screens without acknowledging anything or anybody else.
Federico Casalegno aims to avoid that dynamic.
The director of the MIT Mobile Experience Lab looks to innovate
with technology but only in support of the user. This approach results
in less impersonal hotel lobbies, smarter gas stations, more intuitive
homes, and a conference that examines creativity with a decidedly
bottom-up approach. “We want to design technologies around people,
not people around technologies,” Casalegno says.
The warmer reception area
The hotel lobby is a well-established place — check-in desk, free news-
papers, restaurant — and it’s not wholly impersonal, but it’s not always
inviting. Casalegno has partnered with Marriott to take embedded
media and create a lobby as a social space. Business travelers are the
testing target audience, so Casalegno has used LinkedIn accounts as
source material. Once a guest checks into the hotel and unlocks their
network from a phone or laptop, Casalegno’s application would match
people based on various components, such as industry, college, and
shared connections.
But more than just picking out common words, the app is able to
rank the strength of potential matches. Before it would put together
people who have worked in the same city, it would introduce people
who have worked at two of the same companies. A long with the app,
Casalegno has designed an interactive lobby table that works in the
same respect. When someone places their mobile device on it, the
device would glow, alerting the person of possible connections, along
with providing a scrolling text of events of interest in both the hotel
and the area. Moreover, the hotel’s concierge can further customize
events for guests.
As Casalegno says, this new lobby isn’t necessarily doing anything
that a person couldn’t do on their own. But the technology, now in
the prototype stage (see p. 11) and ready for expanded testing, is an
example of how location-based media and ubiquitous computing can
further socia l interactions for both the hotel and guest. “It brings hos-
pitality to a new era and makes for a richer experience,” Casalegno
says. “And when there are many hotels in a market, this tai loring is the
kind of thing that can make you stand out.”
More than filling up your tank 
Much like with the lobby, the gas station has been a consistent entity.
But Casalegno says that it’s also been stagnant in its design and un-
fulfilled in its potential as a multi-use urban space. Before he made
any changes, he had students travel around his native Italy, stopping
at hundreds of stat ions and observing how people use them and how
they could use them. From that ethnographic research, he’s partnered
with the oil and gas company ENI and created a full-scale, future-
looking prototype.
The changes first start with the essential service of providing
fuel. Some simple technologies can make that transaction smoother,
Casalegno says. In his model, the station would immediately recognize
a driver’s model, direct it to an available pump, and know what kind of
fuel the car uses. The pump and nozzle would use robotics to eliminate
the need for human interaction. Payment would become seamless,
he says, and also eliminate human assistance, since the station would
recognize the dr iver and be able to access the person’s bank account.
But that’s just one aspect of the design. The station is also greener,
 

 
rainwater. And while the intent is to remove unnecessary human
intervention, it’s not to eliminate it. The station would dissemi-
nate transportation-related information and also serve as a shared
workspace, providing high connectivity and access to video confer-
encing and the latest communication devices. Rather than having to
drive somewhere or do business from the car, the person can remain
in one place. “We expand the gas stat ion, which is sustainable in terms
of energy use and architectural design, into a hub, which provides
mobility-on-demand for users,” Casalegno says.
Bringing together ideas
More than designing elaborate solutions, Casalegno’s work often
involves injecting a new way of thinking into a process. To that end,
he organized the Design Driven Innovation conference at MIT.
While it brings together engineers, creators, builders and students
from strategic design, digital experiences, fabrication and prototyp-
ing, the starting point for all the conversations, regardless of product
or clientele, is understanding behavior. “We design for humans,” he
says. “And even if we design robots, they will help humans to have
better exper iences and richer life.”
Along with generating ideas, the conference explores a sometimes
overlooked necessity in product development — how to develop
quick prototypes and test designs in real-world settings. An example,
which Casalegno has been working on, is the smar t, connected home.
Casalegno says he wanted something that was both environmentally
friendly and responsive to conditions. The house envelope is made
out of easy-to-assemble, sustainable wood. The inside is wired, and
temperature is controlled in order to optimize energy usage. Along
with internal monitoring, the windows can respond to the weather
and needs of the house by changing f rom tinted to opaque.
Another project involved Google Glass. Casalegno’s lab has been
working with Avea Telcom on a new app that would add to eat ing out.
But like with hi s other works, before any technology was conceived,
he had students go into restaurants to understand the diner’s experi-
ence. The research was done in Istanbul, so one of the prevailing
issues was understanding a menu and talking to a waiter when it’s in
a foreign language.
More than develop a translation app — a relatively easy and acces-
sible fix, Casalegno says — the intention was to encourage social in-
teraction. The app that was developed provides real-t ime information
about food items, such as how they’re grown and eaten, and then
connects the user with locals. That kind of enhancement and fostering
connections are central to Casalegno’s work, balancing innovation
with re sponsiveness. “Technology doesn’t have to be simple,” he says.
“It just has to be user-friendly, efficient, and help the customer util ize
their power more. If you offer that, that’s what people will probably
choose.”
 

 
Eyes Over Kenya
Chelsea Barabas, CMS ’15 
Chelsea Barabas and Jude Mwenda (MAS, ’15) spent January’s
Independent Activities Period in Kenya, where they collaborated with
wildlife conservancies to conduct a feasibility assessment for the use of
drone technologies to support anti-poaching activities. They conducted a
series of workshops with wildlife conservation workers and local communi-
ties who reside on the border of wildlife parks in order to understand the
challenges they face in deploying drone technologies in a sustainable way.
The goal of the project was to identify support mechanisms that need to be
 put into place in order for drones to be a sustainable intervention for con-
servation efforts in Kenya. The four sections of this piece were authored
as reports from the field.
1. Drones in Ol Pejeta
I arrived in Kenya with two colleagues, Jude Mwenda and
 John Kidenda, to work on a project exploring the potential of
applying unmanned aerial vehicle technology — drones — to
promote conservation efforts in Kenya. Earlier this week we
travelled to Ol Pejeta, a private wild life conservancy located near Mt.
Kenya in the northern part of the country. In addition to being home
to a rich ecosystem of flora and fauna, Ol Pejeta serves as the guardian
territory for over one hundred rhinos, including three of the five
remaining northern white rhinos in the world. Given the immense
price a northern white rhino horn fetches in the black market, this
part icular rhino species has been nearly driven to extinction. Ol Pejeta
spends a large amount of time and effort every year guarding these
anima ls, as well as other endangered species, from poaching activities.
Last year the conservancy conducted a drone pilot study to explore
ways they could use this emerging technology to supplement their
ongoing efforts to catch and deter poachers from killing animals on
their land. Our team was interested in this project, because to date it
is one of the most ambitious drone projects undertaken on the African
continent, where access to this type of technology is still in the early
stages of development. Jude, John, and I travelled to the conservancy
to learn more about how the project was going, as well a s investigate
ways we could support Ol Pejeta’s work in the future.
Over the last couple of days we have had some very interesting and
informative meetings with some of the key leaders in the conservan-
cy’s drone project. They explained some of the chal lenges they faced
in using drones specifically for anti-poaching efforts. For example, Ol
Pejeta covers a very la rge swath of land, making it d ifficult to pinpoint
exactly where a poaching situation may be taking place once a gunshot
has been heard. Even if an approximate location can be identified
through triangulating data from different park ranger watch towers,
poachers are likely to be on the run within minutes of firing their
weapons at an animal. This means that a d rone needs to have enough
battery life not only to arrive at the site of violence but also to track
poachers once they start running from the crime scene. With a full
battery, the drone that Ol Pejeta used for their initial pilot could fly
for a maximum of ninety minutes. However, the park guards estimate
that they would need at least four hours of flight t ime in order for the
drone to be usefu l during a chase down of poachers. Moreover, even
with an expensive, commercial-grade camera it was very difficult for
the park staff to glean critical information about exactly how many
people might be involved in a poaching hit and whether or not they
were armed. Without such informat ion, it was difficult for rangers to
know how to best approach a band of fleeing poachers.
After reviewing some of these challenges, we explored with the
Ol Pejeta staff other potential use-cases for the drone technology in
their work. We discussed the potential for using drones to conduct
more frequent animal censuses, as well as tracking the health and
expansion of specific vegetation. Our team is now in the process of
using thi s fieldwork as a launch point for more brainstorms about how
our specific backgrounds in citizen science and gra ssroots technology
development might support this work. We are also ramping up to
conduct our first pilots of our own drone technology. We have DJI
Phantom II drone, as well as three different types of cameras we want
to experiment with to understand what type of imaging is possible
with-low grade cameras, as well as how resilient the drone compo-
nents are to the elements in east Africa.
 2. Plant Analysis Drone Pilot 
During our trip one of the key things we have learned about are the
challenges of using drones to track and catch poachers. The folks at
Ol Pejeta explained to us that they understood the primar y benefit of
launching an anti-poaching drone project to be the deterrent factor
of having an “eye in the sky.” Drones were unlikely to be able to pro-
actively spot and prevent poachers from entering the park, but they
could mitigate poaching activity by making surveillance and protec-
tion measures both more apparent and ominous to outside observers.
However, we wondered how long the deterrent effect would la st if the
rates at which poachers were actually apprehended did not actually
 

F E A TUR E S
drone flight time and the toll that the rugged environment took on
the drone hardware, it remains unclear whether or not drones would
actually increase park rangers’ effectiveness at tracking poachers.
In light of these findings, our team decided to spend the last couple
of weeks exploring a different conservation use case for drones: veg-
etation monitoring and spotting illegal charcoal burning. In Kenya,
charcoal burning is a growing ecological concern, because it often
involves the indiscr iminate clear-cutting of trees and shrubs on public
land. Exper ts are concerned that the rapid rates of deforestation could
exacerbate the effects of draught, increasing soil erosion and reducing
the vibrancy of the sur rounding flora. Currently, there is no efficient
and methodical way to monitor such activity.
Over the last week or so, our team hacked together two different
types of cameras to see whether or not we could observe charcoal
burning from the sky. The first camera we used was an Infragram
camera from Public Lab. This camera provides an open source
platforms to analyze plant health with near infrared imagery. The
second camera was a cheap Raspberry Pi camera module. In contrast
to the cameras piloted at Ol Pejeta, which cost around $7,000, our
cameras were quite cheap. We spent less than $100 for the parts we
assembled. In addition to these two cameras we also had a GoPro
camera (around $250) and mount that we used to compare the qual ity
of the images we gathered. Our plan was to assemble these cameras,
then to collect data out in a place where charcoal is f requently burned
out in the open. To do this, we travelled to a town about 40 km
outside of Nairobi, called Mat tu. A good fr iend of Jude’s named Jason
is from this area , so he accompanied us as a local guide.
Given large amounts of traffic on the roads leaving Nairobi, it took
us much longer than we expected to reach our destination. As we
pulled into town we had only about an hour of sunlight left in the
day! As such, we decided that our safest bet would be to travel to
 Jason’s family land and build our own fire in a pit in the ground,
simulating an actual charcoal burning experience. Jude and I rapidly
gathered firewood for the task as John and Jason prepared the drone
and cameras for flight.
As we rapidly went about our work, a small crowd of curious
onlookers came to observe what we were doing. With only about
thirty minutes of daylight left, we launched our drone in the air,
flying it over the plot where the fire was burning. We took photos on
all three of our cameras, capturing not only the fire but also a mag-
nificent sunset against the hills of Mattu.
 
Mission accomplished! With our friendly onlookers.
 

 
SPRING EVENT HIGHLIGHTS
“ILLUMINATED BODIES” Kat Von D, LA Ink, and the Borderlands of Tattoo Culture Theresa Rojas, Ohio State University and Predoctoral Fellow in
Comparative Media Studies/Writing 
“WOMEN IN SCIENCE” Computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti and energy studies expert
 Jessika Trancik
MIT Building 66, Room 110
“COMING OF AGE IN DYSTOPIA” The Darkness of Young Adult Fiction Kristin Cashore, author of the award-winning Graceling Realm
trilogy, and the University of Florida’s Kenneth Kid 
March 19 @ 5:00 pm
MIT Building 66, Room 110
“RE-CALLING THE MODEM WORLD” The Dial-up History of Social Media Kevin Driscoll  (Ph.D., University of Southern California and
S.M. in CMS, ’11), postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research
April 9 @ 5:00 pm
MIT Build ing 4, Room 231
“HATE CRIMES IN CYBERSPACE” Danielle Keats Citron, University of Maryland Francis King
Carey School of Law 
May 7 @ 5:00 pm
Full listings on p. 23, and online at cmsw.mit.edu
images. Success! (We weren’t 100% confident that the Pi camera we
built would actually work the first time, but it did!) The next task
for us was to repurpose some code that Jude found to analyze the
data. The code involves an algorithm that analyzes aerial satellite
images to identify ground fires based on the level of vegetation on
the ground and the smoke billowing from the fire. Over the weekend
 Jude adapted th is code to serve our needs.
3. Drone Workshop at the iHub
Last Friday our team held a drone workshop with our partners at the
iHub, a center for collaboration and tech incubation in Nairobi. The
goal of the workshop was to convene entrepreneurs and hobbyists
who are currently working with drones in Kenya to discuss current
and future applications of drone technology in the local context.
We were keen to learn from participants about the challenges and
potential opportunities they identified for using drones for entrepre-
neurial activities, as well as addressing social and conservation issues.
We were not sure how many people would attend the workshop.
In prior weeks, we conducted some research and invited about ten
individual s who were working with drones or aerial technology more
generally. In add ition, we posted the event on the iHub website. We
were aiming to have about a dozen participant s attend. However, on
the day of the event we were pleasantly surprised by the number of
people who turned up, around forty par ticipants in total. The par tici-
pants ranged from young adults from Kibera’s Tunapanda Inst itute (a
center that provides tech and computer training to young adults with
minimal resources) who had never seen a drone before, to seasoned
engineers and entrepreneurs who were building their own drones
from scratch and developing business models based on their drone
expertise.
We opened our workshop with a discussion of how drones are
currently being used in Kenya. Right now, the most common applica-
tions are media dr iven: using drones to capture aerial images of events
like weddings and journalistic reporting of large public events. Some
 

 
people were using drones to develop promotional and marketing
material, such as filming commercial real estate. We then moved to
talking about aspirational uses of drones in the future. People had
some great ideas, such as using drones to monitor traffic flows and de-
livering medicine and remote diagnostics to medical patients in rural
areas. Participants also conceptualized drones as a potential new infra-
structure, which could make some services such as wifi hotspots more
accessible to the general population.
After discussing some of the inspirational potential use-cases of
drones, we moved to discuss some of the significant challenges we as
a community of drone enthusiasts faced in fostering innovation and
experimentation with this technology. Kenya, like most countries,
has not yet developed a robust policy framework for regulating drone
activity. However, as recent as last week the Kenyan Civil Aviation
Authority issued a notice requiring anyone who wants to deploy
drones for personal or public use to receive permission before doing so.
The proclamation was received with mixed emotions. On one hand,
this provides some clarit y and protection for people who feared being
arrested or harassed by the police for flying their drones. However, it
remains unclear how difficult it will actually be to obtain permission
from the KCAA. Additionally, the group expressed a desire for clear
guidelines regarding operator liability and the establishment of per-
missible civilian fly zones. (Continues p. 16…)
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UPDATES AND OTHER NEWS
Critical to any new technology’s success is
having a cadre of people who are able to
lead the development of new legal and social
 frameworks for dealing with the ambiguity
and contingencies brought about by a new
technology.
AND RESEARCH
novative academic agenda with collaborative research at the
frontier of media change. CMS/W is committed to shaping
new media uses and practices for a range of purposes — from
entertainment, education, and creative expression to civic en-
gagement and community empowerment.
us to pursue this far-reaching mission.
For information on funding opportunities, contact Director
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Individual Donors Individual supporters are essential to the CMS/W mission,
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 — provid ing living expenses and a stipend, one of the ways
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Foundation, Corporate, and Public Support Major support from private foundations, industry sponsors, and
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Education Program.
 
In addition to policy issues, the group also discussed challenges
with the hardware and software platforms on which drones operate. It
is very difficult for local enthusiasts to repai r and replace parts on their
drones. Not only is it difficult to source manufactured goods from
abroad, but it’s also challenging to find the resources and materials
necessary to manufacture locally. One participant described his frus-
tration after attempting to access one of the few 3D printers located
in Nairobi in order to recreate a component on his drone. Addition-
ally, finding skilled individuals who have the ability to develop and
implement local designs was also a challenge. The drone market is
not big enough to provide a steady income for software engineers and
designers who are in high demand in other sectors.
After brainstorming some of these challenges we broke into small
groups to discuss specific short-term and long-term solutions to each
of these problem areas. This was probably the most fruitfu l part of our
workshop, as it gave us a chance to dig into tangible next-steps we
could take in order to develop the experimental drone community in
Kenya. There was great enthusiasm around the idea of establishing a
permanent group of lobbyists and hobbyists to exchange knowledge
and advocate for more robust policies from the government. We
have already established a working group that will be working on
an “internal code of ethics” and certification process for the drone
community in Kenya. Our hope is to form a citizen community
that self-regulates their drone activity, as well as provides training to
novices who are new to the risks and chal lenges of flying drones. We
are also planning to build a website which will serve as an online hub
for drone operators across east Africa.
Overall, the workshop was a great success.
Although the number of people interested in drones in Kenya is
quite large, they had never held a formal convening to get to know one
another and share their experiences. Our event provided an opportu-
nity for these disparate individuals to coalesce into a community. The
workshop also enabled our team to identify tangible opportunities
to extend our work moving forward. In the coming months, I look
forward to contributing to this emerging community and developing
more interventions to overcome the challenges we identified during
these initial discussions.
4. Final Reflections
Over the last few weeks, we’ve had some diverse and highly educa-
tional exper iences working on our UAV project in Kenya. The goal of
our project was to survey the landscape for future innovation and ap-
plications using drone technology in the region. This work involved
interviewing individuals and organizations currently experimenting
with drones in Kenya, as well as building and piloting some of our
own technology to gain some practical insights into the challenges
and opportunities of using drones in this context.
From these experiences, we learned a few key things:
• There already exists a large number of UAV enthusiasts, designers,
and hackers in Kenya. But before January this group had not co-
ordinated themselves into a cohesive community. This is rapidly
changing. The workshop we held at the iHub a couple of weeks
ago has sparked the formation of a group calling themselves the
Association of UAV Operators in Kenya. There are currently about
twenty members actively engaging in conversations and debates
about how to further the interests of the drone community moving
forward. For example, this pa st weekend, a small group convened
at a local cafe to start early conversations around the development
of an advocacy and lobbying group to interface with the govern-
ment regarding future regulations and guidelines for drone use.
The formation of this group is quite timely, as the Kenyan Civil
Aviation Authority just recently announced that any and all indi-
viduals using drones (for personal or commercial use) must receive
permission from the government before doing so. It remains
unclear how difficult it will be to obtain such permission, but this
group is dedicated to building a support network to facilitate the
process.
• There is a lot of potential for drones to be a highly-beneficial
leapfrog technology in the Kenyan context. Our discussions with
thought-leaders on the ground revealed many thoughtful and
creative potential use ca ses for drones in the future. Many of these
 

 
ideas conceptualized drones as a potential support infrastructure,
on which critical services and products, such as the delivery of
medicine or disaster response, could be implemented more effi-
ciently. Developing “as the crow flies” dist ribution channels could
be immensely beneficial, particu larly in areas of the country where
the road infrastructure is underdeveloped (rural areas) or where
traffic is quite dense (Nai robi).
• Drones provide an interesting educational platform for the devel-
opment of critical skills necessary for the future growth of the
Kenyan tech scene. Not only do drones provide opportunities
for individuals to develop skills in handling both software and
hardware, but they also provide a unique opportunity for young
entrepreneurs to familiarize themselves with the uncertainty that
comes along with working with a cutting-edge technology. The
legal and social structures currently in place have not had the op-
portunity to catch up to speed with the rapid development of UAV
technology. Critical to any new technology’s success is having a
cadre of people who are able to lead the development of new legal
and social frameworks for dealing with the ambiguity and contin-
gencies brought about by a new technology. Drones provide an op-
portunity to develop these skills, which can strengthen the future
trajectory of the Kenyan tech scene overall.
• Although there is much enthusiasm around drones in Kenya, there
are very few UAV-based projects that have managed to establish
sustainable long-term operations. The price of drones is still quite
high, while the accessibility of critical parts for maintenance is
still quite low. Entrepreneurs also struggle to hire employees
with the skills necessary to scale the design and manufacture of
locally-sourced drones. However, there are some promising de-
velopments underway in Kenya, such as the opening of Gearbox,
a shared maker space designed to “bridge the gaps preventing new
inventions and ideas from becoming commercializable products.”
Gearbox is scheduled to open this year, with the primary aim
being to unleash industrial innovation in Kenya, building a base
for widespread economic growth. Organizations like this will be
critical to the future development of an ecosystem where cutting-
edge technologies like drones are able to thrive.
Overall, our time in Kenya has yielded some very interesting
insights for our team. In the coming months, we wi ll continue to col-
laborate with our partners on the ground in order to support the
future development of the drone-innovation ecosystem in the country.
This includes bridging promising projects, such as the work in Ol
Pejeta, with the partners and resources necessary to increase their sus-
tainability. We will al so continue to participate in the emerging UAV-
advocacy community as they take critical next steps to pooling their
resources and efforts to educate policy makers and the general public
about UAV technology.
More writing on Barabas’s and Mwenda’s trip is available via the MIT Public S ervice
Center: http://mitpsc.mit.edu/blog.
 

for Civic Media’s second-round grant from
the Knight Foundation implied   that work
slow, it has done anything but.
Both Assistant Professor Sasha Costanza-
Chock and CMS/Civic Media alum Molly
Sauter (S.M., ’13) published books this fall. In
Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets!: Transmedia
Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement  
(MIT Press), Costanza-Chock takes on the
argument that social media is a sufficient
platform for effective protest; rather, he says
 — using case studies around the proposed
DREAM Act, police brutality against those
supporting immigrant rights, and others —
it serves to complement methods of face-to-
face organizing. Sauter, now a Ph.D. student
at McGill University, expanded her CMS
thesis into a book published by Blooms-
bury Academic, The Coming Swarm: DDOS,
Hactivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet .
Costanza-Chock and Sauter featured their
writing in talks this fall. (A podcast and
liveblog of the latter, produced by CMS
grad students, is available at http://mitsha.
re/1K34AUg.)
Chelsea Barabas and Media Lab grad student
 Jude Mwenda t ravelled to Kenya to research
the opportunities and challenges of using
UAV technology to address social and eco-
logical challenges in east Africa (see story
on p. 12). Their work focused on testing
low-cost methods for monitoring the illegal
clear cutting of trees to make charcoal, as
well as exploring potential ways to augment
existing drone projects through the use of
citizen science platforms (like Zooniverse)
to help process the data gathered by drones.
They also held a workshop at Nairobi’s iHub
in order to learn about the civic applications
other drone hobbyists are experimenting
with in Kenya.
In fall 2014, CCI welcomed two new grad
student research assistants — Lilia Kilburn
and Lacey Lord — as well as a new faculty
member, T.L. Taylor. Taylor and Ian Condry
are co-teaching the graduate workshop in
ethnographic methods this spring. The two’s
other courses are consonant with the CCI
approach, that is, by bring ing a focus on how
people use media in their lives, rather than on
focusing on texts or the materiality of media
forms. CCI uses ethnographic approaches as
complementary to other approaches to media
studies. Its work remains focused on using
exploring the intersections of online and
offline worlds to identify new solutions to old
problems.
research into the uses of online platforms for
pregnant moms, it also has research projects
exploring video streaming (Taylor) and
the future of music creativity and industry
(Condry).
doing innovative work as well.
Chelsea Barabas is writing about hiring in
the tech industry, based on summer research
in San Francisco where she did fieldwork
with a group aiming to help minority youth
get tech jobs. She also interviewed leading
executives who use social media data mining
to identify promising job candidates.
Desi Gonzales, another a second-year grad
student, is writing about maker spaces in art
museums, and how this is transforming what
we think of as art making.
Finally, we are also working with CMS
undergrad major Karleigh Moore, who is
conducting research on fandom in Tumblr.
All in all, it’s exciting times for CCI, which
we look forward to identifying more people
who might be interested in joining our team.
cmsw.mit.edu/cci 
of The Education Arcade’s attention this fall
 — EdTechX, a ser ies of MITx online courses
available on EdX and Using Popular Games
for Serious Learning, a two-year research-
based design project. Both projects are col-
laborative efforts with the MIT Game Lab.
Using Popular Games for Serious Learning
represents a new challenge. The Education
Arcade is typically charged with looking at
a specific instructional challenge and then
creating a new game to address that learning
objective. In this project, it will be looking
at existing games and game platforms to
identify games that are already popular with
high school students and identifying learning
objectives that might be addressed via a com-
bination of game-play and other instructional
practices. It will focus on humanities instruc-
tion at the high school level. With the support
of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, Kyrie
Caldwell, Rik Eberhardt, Scot Osterweil,
Philip Tan, and Carole Urbano have spent
the fall researching high school humanities
content standards to determine which might
benefit from game-based learning activities.
The team has al so been searching to uncover
existing practices of teachers using commer-
cially available digital games. The project is
highly collaborative and the team has been
working to identify potential partner school
districts and teachers interested in finding
new ways to engage students. These teachers
will serve as co-designers.
as the team has expanded the current pilot
to include middle grades. The online multi-
player quest-based game includes more than
115 quests in seven topic areas including
genetics, evolution, ecosystems, and human
body systems as well as quest lines for
geometry, algebra, and statistics quest lines.
Graduate student Jesse Sel l developed support
materia ls that the more than 13,000 users can
use to get a feel for the game and enhance
their play experience.
 

P E O P L E , P L A C E S , T H I N G S
HyperStudio launched a new version of An-
notation Studio, its collaborative digital an-
notation tool. Supported by a Startup and
Implementation Grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, it has
expanded its user base to more than 2,500,
from high schools and community colleges to
universities. Instructors in literature, writing,
and foreign languages have integrated it into
their curricula. One can now filter annota-
tions according to tags, users, and visible text
segments and work with a greater variety of
text formats. Inst itutions can now set up their
own branded instances. In November, Hy-
perStudio organized an Annotation Studio
webinar in which faculty members Wyn
Kelley (Literature), Suzanne Lane (WRAP),
Ina Lipkowitz (Literature), and Jim Paradis
(CMS/W) discussed different pedagogical
approaches for classroom integration.
HyperStudio has significantly advanced
Artbot uses server-side data scraping, text
analysis, and content linking to create indi-
vidualized suggestions, all presented through
an elegant mobile interface. HyperStudio
wil l launch a beta version, conduct extensive
user testing, and continue to make improve-
ments on backend recommendation system.
The project leads, Liam Andrew and Desi
Gonzalez, will present their research on de-
veloping cultural discovery systems at the
2015 Museums and the Web conference.
RA Andy Stuhl has worked closely with
 Jeff Ravel and other French theater scholar s
on developing case studies that allow users of
the Comédie-Française Registers Project to
explore the range of research questions that
can be addressed with the project’s tools. A
multi-dimensional analysis tool developed
dynamic insights into the many facets of the
project’s data from 1680-1793. The project’s
tools and website will go live in June.
hyperstudio.mit.edu
Boston Festival of Indie Games in September,
bringing over 3,000 members of the public
to MIT to meet 200 game developers that
spanned digital, tabletop, and experimental
genres. Speakers addressed issues of diversity,
representation, technology, live-action role
We continued to host lectures and meetups
for local game developers such as Boston
Indies, Women In Games Boston, and Boston
Unity Group. Topics included sensor inputs
and deck-building game design.
to help them understand how game design and
development could work with their business.
We also worked with LearnDistrict to present
“Girls Make Games”, a two-day workshop,
and with the People’s Republic of Interactive
Fiction and Boston Indies for the Interactive
Fiction Jam. Our lab also hosted the Global
Game Jam for the seventh year.
Riot Games and Epic Games came to
campus to talk to students about their technol-
ogy and job opportunities. Suehiro “SWERY”
Hidetaka and Blizzard Entertainment gave
lectures in classes about their experiences as
game designers. Many scholars visited and
shared their work during our monthly lab
lunches, including Celia Pearce, Sebastian
Deterding, Simon Niedenthal, Jesper Juul,
David Dufresne, and Gabrielle Trépanier-
 Jobin. Philip Tan presented his work with
Blizzard Entertainment at GDC Next 2014
and will be joining T.L. Taylor and Jesse Sell
at GDC 2015 to discuss design and collegiate
participation in eSports.
Red Crescent Climate Center to prototype
digital games on cholera hygiene, heat wave
mitigation, and humanitarian funding models.
The Climate Center used one game during the
UN Climate Talks.
and released multiple projects. Director Fox
Harrell is spending the 2014-2015 academic
 year at Stanford Universit y as a recipient of a
fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study
in the Behavioral Sciences and a Lenore
Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship
in Communication. Professor Harrell’s focus
will be on developing computational media
systems that can achieve greater aesthetic,
affective, and social resonance — in particu-
lar, games and social media for expressing and
better understanding cognitive phenomena
supports authoring games and interactive
narratives that more effectively take social
identity into account. In Chimera, social
identity categories are gradient (members
can be more or less central to categories),
dynamic (members can move between cat-
egories), and allow for multiple memberships.
Harrell is also consolidating results of his
5-year NSF Career Grant-supported project
called “Computing for Advanced Identity
Representation” for publication.
an MIT Open Documentary Lab visiting
artist, photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa,
on a virtual reality project aimed at engen-
dering empathy in the face of war cal led The
Enemy. He and the project have received
support from the Sundance and Tribeca In-
stitutes. The Lab is developing models of in-
teractive narrat ive and user identity dynamics
as the user interacts with virtual versions of
real combatants on both sides of internat ion-
al conflicts. CMS graduate student Ainsley
Sutherland is working on her related thesis
on forms of engagement in virtual reality.
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Ph.D. students Chong-U Lim and Dominic
Kao are publishing frequently in the areas
of modeling identity in social media, games,
and related educational technologies.
 

with La Fabr ique De La Cité, a French urban
innovation think tank to understand millen-
nials’ expectations from the cities that they
live in. The goal of the research is to imagine
and design a caring city for tomorrow. In
order to do so the research team set up an
international observatory spanning multiple
and Istanbul. The research methodology
combines immersion, visual ethnography,
with resident millennials and experts. The
qualitative study uncovers millennials’ ex-
pectations on various aspects of city life such
as services, infrastructure, housing, mobility,
and wellbeing and allows the research team
to project how a Caring City of tomorrow
should perform.
an Itali an petrochemical and energy company
to understand how wearable technology can
make dangerous and extreme environments,
such as industrial plants, safer. aWEARness
is a project that facilitates communication
between workers involved in the energy ex-
traction energy. The goal of the research is
to assist industrial plant workers in lowering
their margin of error, thus contributing to
their safety. After an extensive secondary
research focused on understanding the ways
in which biosensors can be used to gauge the
emotional and physical st ate of a worker. The
research team built prototypes utilizing state
of the art low-power technology and smart
materials to inform further conversation and
research.
prototyping with Marriott were featured in a
piece about lab director Federico Casalegno
by the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (see
p. 10).
The MIT Open Documentary Lab received a
grant this fa ll for $175k from the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to map
and assess the intersection of new documen-
tary forms and digital journalism. Professor
Willi am Uricchio and his team will chart this
emerging landscape.
convening, “The New Realit y: Exploring the
intersection of New Documentary Forms and
Digital Journalism”. They hosted over forty
leading journalists, scholars, documentar-
as PBS Frontline, BBC, The New York Times,
The Marshall Project, Vox Media, Tribeca
Film Institute, and Sundance Institute. They
explored a range of topics from new tech-
nologies to audience engagement and new
documentary forms and processes. They
explored questions such as how to better fa-
cilitate knowledge transfer between interac-
tive documentarians and journalists, helping
each to make use of lessons-learned in these
institutionally distinct domains.
leading international artists, scholars, and
technologists including Lara Baladi, an
Egyptian artist who is exploring how to best
present her archives of the Egyptian Revolu-
tion and Raney Aronson, deputy executive
producer of PBS’s Frontline, who is exploring
new forms of documentary storytelling.
Research assistants Sean Flynn and Deniz
Tortum are busy speaking at festivals, con-
ducting research for the MacArthur grant, or
creating content for Docubase, a curated in-
teractive databa se of the people, projects, and
technologies transforming documentary in
travelled to Sundance to wr ite about the New
Frontier exhibit. They were accompanied by
ODL Director Sarah Wolozin, who presented
Docubase on a panel about the future of doc-
umentary.
opendoclab.mit.edu
a branch in New York City, where the lab’s
director, Nick Montfort, is teaching at the
New School and working on other projects.
He continues research with the MIT-based
Trope Tank team, Erik Stayton, and newly
appointed writer-in-residence Andrew
Trope Tank recently completed phase one of
the Renderings project, the results of which
were published in the online journal Cura.
Phase one included thirteen computational
and digital literary works that were translated
from, or written bilingually in, six languages:
Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Polish,
and Spanish. Renderings is being reformu-
lated as a distributed project, with partici-
pants worldwide, and the source languages
and types of work are being expanded for the
next phase.
eration project Slant, an international col-
laboration to further develop a large-scale
automatic story generator:
People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction,
the local IF group, and to support research,
creative work, and teaching using material
computing resources, for instance by partici-
pating in an MIT Museum event during the
coming semester.
 

P E O P L E , P L A C E S , T H I N G S
Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Com-
munication (WRAP) is devoted to teaching
students how to analyze and produce effective
communication. WRAP researches these
new pedagogy, and assesses how students
learn, apply, and transfer this knowledge.
Many of our research projects are developed
in our new research lab, ArchiMedia, for
which we grateful ly acknowledge the support
of the Qatar Foundation. With the aid of our
research assistant, Lily Bui, ArchiMedia is
pursuing two central projects this year.
First, with a grant from MIT’s d’Arbeloff
fund, we are developing online communica-
tion instruction modules for MITx, specifi-
cally designed for use in project engineering
laboratory subjects. We’ve invented what we
term “reasoning diagrams,” which illustrate
the underlying relationships between central
concepts in the research and experimental
design process, and we have designed new
textual analysis tools so that students can
manipulate and analyze texts within MITx.
Preliminary results, when these modules
were incorporated into a Materials Science
and Engineering subject, reveal strong gains
in understanding of research concepts and the
ability to communicate research to different
audiences. The modules are being adapted for
use in a Chemical Engineering project labo-
ratory subject.
another central focus of our research: how
digita l media is shaping new practices in pro-
fessional communication and in communi-
cating science and engineering to the public,
such as in the shift to incorporating graphical
abstracts in STEM journal articles, and to
presenting poster presentations in e-poster
sessions. Our goal is to provide a taxonomy
and theoretical framework for assessing the
effects of these new communication practices.
cmsw.mit.edu/wrap
saw her Guardian art icle “How Insects Could
Feed the World” named by Foodtank as a
“Top 8 Magazine Articles About Food in
2014”. The article describes the possibil-
ity of helping feed the world’s projected
nine billion inhabitants with those plentiful,
crunchy, protein-filling buggers.
Bald  received a 2015 Association for Asian
American Studies award for his book Bengali
Harlem: Exploring the Lost Histories of South
 Asian America. The AAAS said “Bengali
Harlem stood out from a stella r crop of books
for its brilliant work of historical recovery
and writing,” describing Bald’s writing as
“beautiful prose” with “telling detail”.
An article lecturer Jared Berezin wrote was
 just published in Disability Studies Quarterly
(“Disabled Capital: A Narrative of Attention
Deficit Disorder in the Classroom Through
the Lens of Bourdieu’s Capital”). The essay
is a research-based personal narrative reflect-
ing on a memorable experience from his days
as a seventh grader struggling with attention
deficit disorder in math class.
Lindsay Brownell  (S.M., Science Writing,
’14) started September by finishing up her
science writing internship at the European
Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidel-
berg, Germany. She then took a whirlwind
Eurotrip through Germany, Austria, Slovenia,
Croatia, and Spain before landing back in
Boston in time to graduate from the GPSW.
She currently works as a science writer for
RA Capital Management, an investment firm
that primarily invests in pharma and biotech
companies. She edits the company’s internal
research reports and manages the internal
newsletter, which will hopefully grow into
an externally-facing venture later this year.
Since December, Denise Cheng  (S.M.,
CMS, ’14) has started working as an innova-
tion fellow with the San Francisco Mayor’s
Office of Civic Innovation.
Hatsune Miku — who performs synthesized
songs writ ten by fans — the Huffington Post
spoke with professor Ian Condry  to better
understand the phenomenon. “‘They know
Miku doesn’t exist,’ Condry says. ‘But they
know people on the other side do.’”
Rodrigo Davies  (S.M., CMS, ’14) joined
Stanford as a Ph.D. student in the Depart-
ment of Management Science and Engineer-
ing. After just one semester, he was persuaded
to take a leave of absence by civic crowdfund-
ing startup Neighbor.ly, to lead their new
product team. At Neighbor.ly he is helping
to build a new platform for individuals and
households to invest in their cities through
municipal bonds.
In what she calls “another win for the CMS
matchmakers,” Katie Edgerton (S.M., CMS,
’13) got engaged to Amar Boghani  (S.M.,
CMS, ’13, and Creative Technologist at our
Mobile Experience Lab.)
’10) is graduating from Harvard Medical
School this coming May and will be
starting residency in emergency medicine
in the summer. During medical school, he
has written on a wide variety of topics in
medicine and plans to continue this through-
out residency.
invited to speak at the conference “Shaping
Access! — More Responsibility for Cultural
Heritage” last November at the Hamburger
Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, Germany. The
event, organized by UNESC