Hasta La Ideas

High-Low Tech is the name of an MIT Media Lab research group led by Assistant Professor Leah Buechley, and when I saw their work I immediately thought of Becky Stern. As their name suggests, the group creates objects by blending technologically-sophisticated items with traditionally craftsy materials. While their projects wouldn’t look out of place in an ID program, the researchers here are not bound by our more pragmatic profession’s demands for real-world applicability; they are free to create purely for the sake of creation in the hopes that they’ll stumble on something wondrous.

High-Low Tech, a research group at the MIT Media Lab, integrates high and low technological materials, processes, and cultures. Our primary aim is to engage diverse audiences in designing and building their own technologies by situating computation in new cultural and material contexts, and by developing tools that democratize engineering. We believe that the future of technology will be largely determined by end-users who will design, build, and hack their own devices, and our goal is to inspire, shape, support, and study these communities. To this end, we explore the intersection of computation, physical materials, manufacturing processes, traditional crafts, and design.

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