What is your AI made of?
ImpactBench measures AI's impact on human health and wellbeing. MIT Media Lab's framework evaluates 807 metrics across 26 benchmarks.
MIT Media Lab
We imagine what humans and machines can be.
Then we build to find out.
Research to make technology more human.
All research-
To understand a brain, watch all of it
Since its 2015 debut by an MIT team, expansion microscopy has advanced research on kidneys, seeds, Alzheimer’s, viruses, and more.
Tiny AI listens for a disappearing bee
A new paper from the Responsive Environments group puts real-time bee identification on a low-power chip inside the BuzzCam field recorder.
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Your tongue is the trackpad
Media Lab spinoff Augmental, which was co-founded by Media Lab alum Tomás Vega and Corten Singer, has launched MouthPad.
Can the brain learn a new anatomy?
Explore embodiment's future with MIT Media Lab's Hugh Herr and Ana Rajčević. How bionic limbs reshape what it means to be human.
A room can change the music
Media Lab alum talks about founding MIT’s new Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program.
What if every front door opened onto a forest?
Chaal is our proposal for the public space of Ghaf Woods, Dubai's first car-free forest community. At its heart is a sunken plaza with wate…
Artificial muscles, soft and silent
Electrofluidic Fiber Muscles are a new class of artificial muscle fibers for robots and wearables. By integrating charge-injection electroh…
Programming the edge of sleep
Media Lab alum Adam Haar Horowitz, a cognitive scientist and CEO of DUST, treats sleep hours as a space to design and influence thought.
Now at the lab. News and updates.
All news
Can a documentary change what science gets funded?
WHx Honorary Chair Susan Blumenthal and MIT's Linda Griffith appear in End of the Cycle, a documentary about endometriosis. Watch now.
What would you tell the tide?
Critical Matter Group have projected sounds and video of the ocean alongside crowd-sourced messages into a public square.
Three decades of computing you can hold.
Professor received the IDSA Special Achievement Award for three decades of research integrating physical and digital environments.
Innovators under 35, across four fields
Shayne Longpre, Ayush Chopra, and Ariel Ekblaw — named to MIT Technology Review's 2026 Innovators Under 35.
Pointing came before prompting
In 1979, MIT Media Lab researchers created 'Put That There' — a voice-and-gesture interface that just inspired OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra launch.
Young people should help shape their digital world
The PhD student works to give young people an active role in shaping digital technologies that can support their own well-being.
Space missions need a plan for what they leave behind
Danielle Wood argues the "launch and leave" model of space design is unsustainable; future missions must plan for cleanup.
A limit built into the technology, not the person
At the MIT Media Lab, engineer and biophysicist Hugh Herr is at the forefront of bionic limbs.
Listeners preferred AI. Human music moved them more
Human-composed music elicits stronger emotions than AI-generated music, MIT Media Lab finds—even when listeners say they prefer AI
Sensing across music, medicine, and ecology
Joseph Paradiso’s sensing research at MIT Media Lab bridges art, medicine, and ecology through wearable sensors and environmental monitoring
Who gets to see a changing planet?
Dr. Lola Fatoyinbo of Space Enabled is named one of The Explorers Club 50 for 2026 in the Innovators category.
We work where ideas collide:
- listening for vanishing species
- can machines move us?
- pain relief you can wear
- stories in motion
- soft mesh building blocks
- the scent of a memory
- textiles that move
- architecture beyond Earth
- leaving no trace in orbit
- wearables for cells
- stories from a changing planet
- a mini-robot on the Moon
- ultrasound that moves with you
- artificial muscles without motors
- turning ideas into matter
- inventing new ways to play
- diagnosing ecosystems
What's taking form. Ideas in progress.
We explore where ideas collide.
Membership puts your organization right in the middle of it.
Meet people thinking beyond your field. Bring your expertise to the conversation. Your organization helps sustain open-ended research while finding new possibilities for its own work.
A place for ideas that need different kinds of minds.
Here, asking and making push each other further. An artist’s question can become an engineer’s experiment. A student’s prototype can open a field of research. For forty years, people have blended and blurred disciplines to explore what technology could make possible—and how it can serve.