Means to an end

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 artifacts may indeed have some utility, but their usefulness is beside the point. They were built as a test prototype, or test bed for the purpose of deeper research.

In this way, it is not the robotic teddy bear that is interesting in itself - it is interesting because of what can be researched when humans are observed interacting with it.  The robot is the means to an end.  The means can come to resemble the end, because in the course of solving the problem of building a robotic teddy bear to understand human interaction, lots of robotics problems got solved that would otherwise not have been tackled.

What does this all mean for Center for Future Banking (CFB)? Well the reality is that the Media Lab may have lots of useful artifacts, or solutions, that may be re-purposed in ways that are completely different than the researchers expect. A person who is with CFB for less than a year is not likely to conduct any research in the academic sense, but he or she may engage in exploratory applications that produce useful artifacts.  A good example of this would be the cell phone applications or the prototypes built by the undergraduate research assistants. None of these are products, but they allow some questions to be asked and insight to be discovered that may be re-purposed by a business with some imagination.

The CFB activities may influence what deeper question are asked by the faculty and researchers, but this will require some attention to understand their perspectives first, and help orient to why banking matters, and why it poses such interesting and deep challenges