Genuine question: what exactly are the major contributions of MIT media lab? I will admit my priors might be unfair,y hostile and my reaction to current travails a little too schadenfreude-ish.
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The lineage of the Maker Movement + Digital Manufacturing came out of the Media Lab and affiliated Center for Bits and Atoms. The "Fab" book was my entry point.
media.mit.edu/groups/center-
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Did the media lab invent any key piece, like 3d printing? I’m wary of vague credit to lineages and manifesto-ish programs with aspirational names.
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You're right though in that when I just reviewed the history of core "Maker" tech, it's not a lot of MIT: Arduino (IDII, Italy), RaspPi (UK), RepRap (U. Bath, UK), Makerbot (NYC).
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So they’re innovation packagers and promoters mainly. Specialists in early-stage charisma engineering in the theater quadrant, as I called it on my last podcast. That’s the sense I get.
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There's both engineering and community that came out of there. For engineering, the ZCorp 3DP tech was invented there, the same tech was used by a few others. FormLabs 3DP was also launched from there.
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The Fab book chronicles the early FabLab movement. Media Lab alums like Ayah Bdeir, Saul Griffith, et al. would go on to be early figures in the Maker Movement. However, Make Magazine was a separate lineage via Dale / Co. from O'Reilly
The Media Lab was the birth of wearable tech, and basically made AR (and VR to some extent) a reality.
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