Creating technology for social change

CabildoxLatAm: A space for digital participation in Latin AmericaIn the face of the challenges that have emerged and been exacerbated&…

Since the 2016 US presidential election, news coverage of hate speech and mis/ disinformation has skyrocketed. What was once a sleepy beat …

In this speculative project, we "flipped the script" on a widespread narrative regarding the use of algorithmic risk assessment for crimina…

Every day, data about our environment, education, routes, and other aspects of our lives become available. Yet most people often struggle t…

Let’s Talk Privacy explores how the implementation of privacy and data governance policies might impact a variety of fields.Project Let’s T…

Mapping the Globe is an interactive tool and map that helps us understand where The Boston Globe directs its attention. Media attention mat…

The fourth industrial revolution has brought new meanings to surveillance in the digital age. In recent years, we have seen the rise of sta…

Space/Craft explores sculpting in zero gravity. Making artistic works by hand is a fundamentally human act, but how will it transform …

Concerned about your privacy online? Worried with whom and how photos of you and/or your family might be shared on social media? You probab…

LinkedOut aims to define and build solutions to facilitate societal reentry for formerly incarcerated individuals.In collaboration with the…

🚨Application to the 2022 Co-Design Experience here bit.ly/codesign2022 🚨In the Civic Media and Space Enabled groups, we are explo…

Bias by us envisions a future of media diversity by understanding the bias of today.Our work seeks to understand how the US media ecos…

Algorithmic auditing has emerged as a key strategy to expose systematic biases embedded in software platforms, yet scholarship on the impac…

As we know from our ‘maker’ classes and workshops, different capabilities and approaches can yield remarkable projects. Let’s facilitate a …

dataVisionaRi is an exploration of big data visualizations techniques in VR. The research generates new taxonomy and structures a…

A Case for Breastfeeding InnovationBreastfeeding saves lives.If women globally were able to meet the WHO's public health goal to exclusivel…

Struggling to build your organization's ability to work with data? Use our hands-on learning program to kickstart your data culture.datacul…

Civic technology should empower us as citizens. But despite its breadth as a field, civic technology often takes its lead from Silicon Vall…

An interactive atlas of census data for direct consumption by individual citizens.

Civic Entertainment is a project based at the Center for Civic Media that explores the intersection of civic engagement with film, televisi…

The Gender Shades project pilots an intersectional approach to inclusive product testing for AI.Algorithmic Bias PersistsGender Shades is a…

Your social media. Your rules.Gobo is an experiment, not a startup. We’re building it to change the conversation on social media and imagin…

Media Cloud is a platform for studying media ecosystems. By tracking millions of stories published online, the system allows researchers to…

How do people who lead communities on online platforms join together in mass collective action to influence platform operators? Going Dark …

Code4Rights promotes human rights through technology education. By facilitating the development of rights-focused mobile applications in wo…

DataBasic is a suite of web-based tools that give people fun and relevant ways learn how to work with data. Existing tools focus on operati…

The Babbling Brook is an unnamed neighborhood creek in Waltham, MA, that winds its way to the Charles River. With the help of networked sen…

Citizens and journalists are increasingly choosing to live stream civic events. But live streams are currently hard to find and lack in-dep…

Promise Tracker is a citizen-monitoring platform designed to help communities track issues they care about and use that information to advo…

As part of our larger effort to build out a suite of tools for community organizers, we are helping to build their capacity to do their own…

In September 2014, 150 parents, engineers, designers, and healthcare practitioners gathered at the MIT Media Lab for the "Make the Breast P…

Newspaper front pages are a key source of data about our media ecology. Newsrooms spend massive time and effort deciding what stories make …

Organizations are deploying gratitude-tracking systems to encourage appreciation, promote pro-sociality, and monitor employee wellbeing. We…

What really divides Cambridge?Who can occupy certain spaces in Cambridge? What are the less obvious social and cultural factors at pla…

OpenScope is an open source project that combines three components for anyone to explore the micro world anytime, anywhere. The 3D-printabl…

Action Path is a mobile app to help people learn about and engage with issues in their community. The app uses push notifications tied to g…

Mission Wildlife is a research collaboration between San Diego Zoo Global and the MIT Center for Civic Media to explore the poten…

Ant-Based Modeling explores the possibility of implementing agent-based modeling with living ants and external stimuli such as el…

Should students be prosecuted for innovative projects? In December 2014, four undergraduates associated with the Media Lab were subpoenaed …

Open Gender Tracker is a suite of open-source tools and APIs that make it easy for newsrooms and media monitors to collect metrics and gain…

The Passing On project uses data from 20 years of New York Times stories about society's heroes, leaders, and visionaries to "reader-source…

Media Perspective brings a data visualization into 3D space. This data sculpture represents mainstream media coverage of Net Neutrality ove…

NGO2.0 is a project grown out of the work of MIT's New Media Action Lab. The goal of NGO2.0 is to strengthen the digital and social media l…

This project is currently promoting a survey of data from the East Side (Zona Leste) of the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The aim is to detect…

VoIP Drupal is an innovative framework that brings the power of voice and Internet-telephony to Drupal sites. It can be used to build hybri…

Everyone in the city is an expert on their own experience of that city. So how might we integrate new forms of citizen input into the plann…

Telepresent robots are often pitched as a technology to extend the influence of those who already have money and power. We want to use robo…

Call to Action is an open-source web platform for creating telephone-based services such as hotlines, voice petitions, and phone blogging. …

Many Twitter users post questions with hashtags like #twoogle or #lazyweb. Is this an effective way to find expert answers beyond one's net…

Vojo.co is a hosted mobile blogging platform that makes it easy for people to share content to the web from mobile phones via voice calls, …

More than a billion people a month visit YouTube to watch videos. Sometimes, those billion people watch the same video. What We Watch is a …

Urban spaces have different uses and different histories for the people who move through and use them. Those layered histories can enrich o…

NewsPad is a collaborative article editor that empowers small communities to write articles collaboratively through community sourcing, str…

Every country has a brand, negative or positive, and that brand is mediated in part by its global press coverage. We are measuring and rank…

Between the Bars is a blogging platform for one out of every 142 Americans�prisoners�that makes it easy to blog using standard postal mail.…

New Day New Standard is an interactive hotline that informs nannies, housekeepers, eldercare-givers, and their employers about the landmark…

The Department of Play (DoP) is a working group of researchers, students, and community practitioners who share a common passion: designing…

Have you ever been forwarded an email that you just can't believe? Our inboxes are rife with misinformation. The truth is out there, just n…

The Toy Interface Construction Kit Learning Environment (T.I.C.K.L.E.) is a universal construction kit for the rest of us. It doesn't requi…