Center for Future Storytelling

NOTE: Center for Future Storytelling was active from September 2008 to September 2017.

With the establishment of the Center for Future Storytelling, the Media Lab, together with Plymouth Rock Studios, is rethinking storytelling for the 21st century. Made possible by a seven-year, $25-million commitment by Plymouth Rock Studios, the Center takes a new and dynamic approach to how we tell our stories, creating new methods, technologies, and learning programs that recognize and respond to the changing communications landscape.

The Center builds on the Media Lab's more than 20 years of experience in developing society-changing technologies for human expression and interactivity, and will now take this to the next level. By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational, and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make and share their own unique stories. Center research will also focus on ways to revolutionize imaging and display technologies, including developing next-generation cameras and programmable studios, making movie production more versatile & economic.

The research program, which began in the fall of 2008, is centered at the Media Laboratory. Researchers at the Lab will work closely with the artisan community at Plymouth Rock Studios, and when the Plymouth Rock campus is completed in 2010, the Center will share locations both at MIT and Plymouth Rock, with the studio becoming a site for workshops, teaching, inventing, testing, and displaying new ideas in sound and motion storytelling.

The overall mission of the Center is to explore the convergence between art and technology -- particularly as related to creative expression through story forms -- in ways that elevate the human experience.

To achieve this overall goal, storytelling-related activities of the CFS will address a set of macro themes:

(*) Experience: developing a new narrative language that is a combination of audio, video, and computation, and supporting transmedia, where the story world is accessible across many media forms (e.g., theatrical, broadcast, on-line, mobile, and new forms to be invented)

(*) Community: building participatory environments in which communities (both pre-existing and dynamically created) can co-create and share their stories in a social and possibly mobile and pervasive manner

(*) Capture/Craft: developing new devices for capturing performance and the world, and for creating new tools and technologies for designing worlds and the experiences that take place in those worlds

(*) Creativity/Expression: empowering individuals—from novice to expert—through accessible tool kits, new on-line approaches to mentoring and co-construction, and environments designed to support distribution and sharing; developing tools and techniques to support the balance of control and interaction between storyteller and audience to sustain a high-quality experience

(*) Engagement/Learning: creating sharing platforms for cross-cultural understanding, supporting learning through engagement with story-based experiences, and enabling mentoring communities that overcome traditional communication barriers

(*) Forms/Medium: creating a positive engagement for a fragmented audience, developing and extending displays and interaction means, creating intelligent characters both virtual and physical (e.g., robots)

Particularly in the early phases of the collaboration between Plymouth Rock Studios and the Media Laboratory, technologies for the studio campus itself (relating, for instance, to sustainability and communications) will also make up a significant part of the activities of the Center.

The Center for Future Storytelling is partnering with Plymouth Rock Studios, a film and television studio that is building a new studio campus in Plymouth, MA, set to open in 2010. Students and faculty from MIT will be able to test their storytelling inventions in the Plymouth studios and receive input from producers, who will have an office set up at the Media Lab.