The innovation that happens at the Media Lab can sometimes seem like magic. Who better to learn from, then, than a technological magician? Cutting-edge magician and Media Lab alumnus Seth Raphaël will teach his techniques for creativity, innovation, and climbing out of the box. Participants will apply the magician's techniques to come up with inspiration and ingenious solutions to complex problems. You will leave this workshop with the skills to complete even the most impossible-seeming tasks.

How can cameras interact with smart objects on our bodies to provide pervasive awareness while maintaining privacy? How can we build transparent interfaces that are intimate with the human body? The Camera Culture group is exploiting unusual opto-electronic elements and computational illumination to create Second Skin, a wearable fabric for bio I/O.

What can we learn about materials and manufacturing from traditional craft practices? How can we integrate new and unusual materials, processes, and cultures both to transform technology and democratize engineering? Come brainstorm and experiment with these ideas by getting your hands dirty: build a flexible and colorful computer out of paint, scissors, fabric, thread, and glue.

On the Web today, people interact with games, animations, and simulations all the time, but few people can create these new forms of media. The Media Lab's Scratch software changes that, empowering everyone to create their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations. Come try out Scratch, and see what it takes to become a full participant in today's digital society.

The mouse is a relatively narrow bandwidth channel for delivering human intent to our digital machines. Researchers in human-computer interaction and related fields have sought to widen this pipeline, allowing for more expressive and natural control over computational systems—a field in which the Media Lab has excelled. In the near future we will have the technology to exert significant control over computers with our bare hands in three-dimensional space—opening the door for a new paradigm of interaction that may eclipse current technologies. Working with Lab sponsor Oblong Industries, we have begun research in this direction. In September we installed Oblong's new low-latency, high-precision gestural interaction platform (g-speak) on the Lab's third floor. In this workshop, Professor Hiroshi Ishii, PhD student Jamie Zigelbaum, and Media Lab alumni John Underkoffler and Kwindla Hultman Kramer, from Oblong, will demonstrate the power of gestural interaction using g-speak, discuss possible research directions in this space, and contemplate the implications of finally outgrowing the ubiquitous mouse.

How can we as strategic thinkers deal with complexity and speed, in an age of super-fast change, global simultaneity, and instant communication? We'll discuss some of the gimmick-free methods—some surprisingly old-fashioned and common-sense—that our multidisciplinary team applies in an attempt to try to accelerate our understanding of the brain, and how these methods can be useful to others dealing with complexity in the business and engineering worlds.

The MIT Media Lab is launching an innovative research alliance with the City of Boston under the auspices of our Living Labs program. This first-of-its-kind collaboration will transform the City of Boston into a living laboratory focused on creating, testing, and deploying new communication services and devices for improving many aspects of everyday life, from health-care delivery, to education, to financial well-being, to neighborhood services.

Focus groups are poor predictors of marketplace success, as are questionnaires asking people how they think they feel about something. But what is better? Come learn about (and try out) several new techniques being developed to measure affective aspects of customer experience. Discuss how combining these new measures with the measures your company uses may possibly improve products and your prediction of their marketplace success.

The New Media Medicine research group is pioneering new media technologies that will enable radical new collaborations between doctors, patients, and communities, to catalyze a revolution in human health. Our work is based on three principles: (1) patients are the most underutilized resource in health care; (2) the revolution must take place in our everyday lives, not in the doctor’s office or the lab; and (3) information transparency, not just information access, is the solution. As the power shifts to people, health care will focus on keeping people well, instead of focusing on medicine and machines, politics and paperwork, or the billion-dollar molecule that becomes the next blockbuster drug. In this workshop, we will discuss our work on automated disease outbreak tracking and visualization, redefining the doctor-patient relationship, and giving patients the chance to speak through a new system for automatically conducting patient pre-visit interviews.

Real-time interactions over the Internet or ad hoc computer networks have plenty of applications, ranging from collaborative design to live entertainment. Online music performances are an especially good case study because of the tight synchronization and timing demands of highly rhythmic music such as Indian percussions. We will present previous attempts to overcome latency, present our novel approach grounded in machine listening and music prediction, and then discuss strategies and applications. This workshop will start at 11:30 because of time constraints: we will have the opportunity to run a real network session with other live, connected sites in California and India.

This workshop will detail a new, multi-modal, ubiquitous sensor network now being deployed across the Media Lab. Several applications of this network will be introduced, including the Spinner system for high-level creation and querying of distributed video and audio, and a proposed multi-layered privacy protocol that aims to enable public acceptance of such ubiquitous sensing capability.

Siftables is a new user-interface platform that gives physical embodiment to digital media, so that they can be manipulated by hand, intuitively and collaboratively. These "embodied media tokens" can each represent content such as a digital image, video clip, control parameter, or node in a computer simulation; sense each other's presence and their own movement; show graphics; and communicate wirelessly. Siftables are already being used by members of our sponsor community to explore new interaction possibilities. This workshop will be an opportunity to share ideas, address challenges, and learn more.

This workshop will focus on the design and implementation of Mobility-On-Demand systems in dense urban environments. Ideally, Mobility-On-Demand systems would consist of fleets of lightweight electric vehicles placed at electrical charging stations strategically distributed throughout the city. Users would simply walk up to the closest station, swipe a membership card, and be given access to vehicles. They would then be allowed to drive to the station (one-way rental) closest to their desired destination. The demand for such a system has already been demonstrated in Paris, where 20,000 shared bicycles are already in use. We have designed two Mobility-On-Demand vehicles: the CityCar and RoboScooter. We will discuss these examples during the session.

By combining social networking and personal mobility, we are creating a new category of applications likely to transform the way people use digital technologies. We call these "Social Area Network" applications. Social Area Networks build new capabilities on social context (e.g., group membership), physical context (e.g., location and existing computing infrastructure), and personal identity information. Workshop participants will discuss opportunities for embedding commerce, entertainment, learning, and civic action in this new form of digitally mediated human expression.

For as long as humans have had language, we have had storytelling. The development of media and digital technology has allowed us to augment this oral tradition in new and creative ways. This workshop will explore the future of storytelling, and how social and technological factors are transforming "story" into a continuous event: evolving with the society in which it will be told, participatory in nature, and embodied in multiple forms from grand theater to viral phenomena and beyond. These trends will impact the palette of tools we use to craft stories, how they are shared and experienced, and how stories shape and are shaped by our personal, business, and social lives.