In our ongoing audio series, Meet the Labbers, we hear people from all roles across the Media Lab talk about what they do and why they do it.

Today, meet Agnis Stibe. 

"My name is Agnis Stibe. I’m from the Media Lab, from Changing Places research group. I’m a postdoc associate right now. I believe that the ultimate aim for mankind and individuals at different scales is wellbeing, and my work is called “persuasive wellbeing.” It’s based on a theory from social psychology which tells that individuals are so much influenced by other people.

My day-to-day work involves designing a solution that would promote wellbeing—so, how we can improve our daily spaces to make healthier choices, Like, for example, we at the Media Lab now think about the project we call Persuasive Stairs. First of all, we’d be using sensing to detect what are the flows coming into the Media Lab and the preference in terms of what they choose: stairs or elevator. And then, once we learn that, we would be projecting data in a specific way using analytics to inform, on a daily basis, instantly. Then a third, which is most important, is the way we feed back that learning about the behaviors, and designing ways of telling it back to people so that people would just feel ‘Oh, I would like to contemplate it within my own behaviors with regards to that kind of crowd behavior; that now I’m able to feel and sense.’

We are creating the future; we are designing it; we are building the future.

Most of the time this is so far away from what people are experiencing now. And, that’s also the beauty of the Media Lab: We are creating the future; we are designing it; we are building the future. The Media Lab is a unique place which pretty much allows people to advance their strengths that you can contribute to the world both in research—understanding new ways of doing things—and applied research. So, we’re collaborating with businesses, and also getting things done out there and seeing how they work.

That’s the brilliance of the Media Lab. And also this, kind of, unlimited potential of just creating, demoing, deploying, seeing—that’s Media Lab, and that’s why I would say ‘Everything is possible right here.’”

Music: “Inspiration” by Jonathan Dana