But far fewer people fully understand how the Media Lab operates, fits into MIT, and encourages such a creative environment; about half of the anniversary celebration’s program focused on simply defining what the Media Lab is. So, for the benefit of those who weren’t there, we’ll attempt to explain how it has generated its reputation for being at the leading edge of technology.

An independent lab

According to one of its founders, Nicholas Negroponte (an early contributor to Wired), the Media Lab was set up as an independent department within MIT because that would allow it to make its own tenure decisions and choose its grad students. That latter factor is a significant one. Most departments accept grad students based on their prospects for academic success; the Media Lab attempts to select ones that will best be able to help with some of the ongoing projects.

Normally, academic departments rely on their faculty to bring in funding, either through individual grants or by contributing to department-wide projects. In contrast, the Media Lab is completely industry-sponsored; there is literally a LEGO Lab in the building (Swatch, Motorola, and a few other companies sponsor other ones). Once they contribute above a certain level, the sponsors get access to any intellectual property that comes out of the Media Lab.

Many of the individual labs are open-plan and high ceiling so that people know what's going on in other labs.

In essence, the entire lab acts in much the way that older industrial labs, like Bell Labs and Xerox Parc, used to, in terms of providing a source of blue-sky research. Instead of constantly worrying about funding, the faculty and students can focus on their project, with the exception of sponsors’ weeks, when they have to convince companies to start or continue their support.

This structure helps ensure that any technology to come out of the Lab has a smoother path to the market. But another factor that contributes to its influence is the fact that the faculty has an emphasis on building things that actually work.

Andrew Lippman, who has spent 35 years at MIT, talked about how the Media Lab faculty and students focus on building functional devices, rather than prototypes that are only good for demonstrations.

As Negroponte described it, this helped make it a solutions-based lab, even though some of the whimsical devices are made in such a way that people “don’t know what the solution is for.” Companies, he suggested, can sometimes look over the technology behind the demos and find solutions to the problems they face.

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Authors: John Timmer

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