Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

Occasionally there’s good news out there.  The Berkman Center for Internet & Society (part of Harvard Law) yesterday released a report on Child Safety and Online Technologies.  The report runs counter to many people’s perceptions of the Internet and its use by minors.  The Internet is safer than our collective perception, and there remains a need for more research [...]

Avatars are having an increasing impact on our lives. It seems we can hardly go anywhere without being involved with an avatar. When we bought a Wii for Christmas last year the first part of setting up the Wii is to create an avatar (Mii). Now Microsoft is working to expand the Xbox 360 from an audience of shooter [...]

The MIT Media Lab builds things quickly, and makes them just functional enough so that they can be used for experimentation. “Build first, ask questions later” is not the typical, well-thought out design for conducting research, but it’s an effective method when fast iteration is key to the process. In fact, this approach is similar [...]

The Media Lab is at the forefront of hybrid methods in research, but what we see is a bit strange since it appears on the surface to be similar to product development. The researchers prefer to build first, and ask questions later.  This is deceptive, since it may produce artifacts that appear to be useful. The [...]