Principal Investigator Rosalind Picard
Co-investigator Patricia Maes
Project Website http://www.media.mit.edu/groups/advancing-wellbeing/overview/
With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the Media Lab's new Advancing Wellbeing initiative addresses the role of technology in shaping our health, and explores new approaches and solutions to wellbeing. The program is built around education and student mentoring; prototyping tools and technologies that support physical, mental, social, and emotional wellbeing; and community initiatives that will originate at the Media Lab, but be designed to scale.
The RWJF grant will also support five graduate-level research fellows from the Program in Media Arts and Sciences who will be part of a year-long training program. The funding will enable each fellow to design, build, and deploy novel tools to promote wellbeing and health behavior change at the Media Lab, and then at scale.
In contributing to the digital revolution, the Media Lab helped fuel a society where increasing numbers of people are obese, sedentary, and glued to screens. Our online culture has promoted meaningfulness in terms of online fame and numbers of viewers, and converted time previously spent building face-to-face relationships into interactions online with people who may not be who they say they are. What we have helped to create, willingly or not, often diminishes the social-emotional relationships and activities that promote physical, mental, and social health. Moreover, our workplace culture escalates stress, provides unlimited caffeine, distributes nutrition-free food, holds back-to-back sedentary meetings, and encourages overnight hackathons and unhealthy sleep behavior. Without being dystopian about technology, this effort aims to spawn a series of projects that leverage the many talents and strengths in the Media Lab in order to reshape technology and our workplace to enhance health and wellbeing.
With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), Cisco, Deloitte, LKK Health Products Group, and Steelcase, the Media Lab's Advancing Wellbeing initiative addresses the role of technology in shaping our health, and explores new approaches and solutions to wellbeing. The program is built around education and student mentoring; prototyping tools and technologies that support physical, mental, social, and emotional wellbeing; and community initiatives that will originate at the Media Lab, but be designed to scale.
One of the significant ways that this program will impact Media Lab culture is in the review of all thesis proposals submitted by students in media arts and sciences. Media Lab faculty recently added a new requirement that all proposals consider the impact of the work on human wellbeing.
Other Media Lab-wide aspects of the initiative include:
(*) A monthly health challenge that would engage the entire lab, with review and analysis of each month's deployment to help inform the next month's initiative.
(*) Pairing students with one another -- to build awareness of wellbeing as a social function, not just a perosonal goal, and to draw on people’s inclination to solve the problems of others differently than their own.
(*) The Media Lab will host a special event in October 2014, where creators of the X-Prize (an organization that designs public technology competitions) will convene at MIT to discuss a new X-Prize for Wellbeing.