MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) Fellow Caitlin Morris is an architect, artist, researcher, and educator who has studied psychology and used on-line studying instruments to show herself coding and different expertise. She’s a soft-spoken observer, with a eager curiosity in how folks use house and reply to their environments. Combining her observational expertise with energetic neighborhood engagement, she works on the intersection of expertise, training, and human connection to enhance digital studying platforms.
Morris grew up in rural upstate New York in a household of makers. She realized to stitch, cook dinner, and construct issues with wooden at a younger age. Considered one of her earlier recollections is of a small handsaw she made — with the assistance of her father, an expert carpenter. It had wood handles on each side to make sawing simpler for her.
Later, when she wanted to study one thing, she’d flip to project-based communities, fairly than books. She taught herself to code late at night time, profiting from community-oriented platforms the place folks reply questions and put up sketches, permitting her to see the code behind the objects folks made.
“For me, that was this enormous, wake-up second of feeling like there was a path to expression that was not a conventional computer-science classroom,” she says. “I feel that’s partly why I really feel so captivated with what I’m doing now. That was the massive transformation: having that neighborhood obtainable on this actually private, project-based means.”
Subsequently, Morris has develop into concerned in community-based studying in numerous methods: She’s a co-organizer of the MIT Media Lab’s Pageant of Studying; she leads inventive coding neighborhood meetups; and he or she’s been energetic within the open-source software program neighborhood improvement.
“My years of organizing studying and making communities — each in individual and on-line — have proven me firsthand how highly effective social interplay will be for motivation and curiosity,” Morris mentioned. “My analysis is actually about figuring out which components of that social magic are most important, so we are able to design digital environments that higher assist these dynamics.”
Even in her paintings, Morris generally works with a collective. She’s contributed to the creation of about 10 giant artwork installations that mix motion, sound, imagery, lighting, and different applied sciences to immerse the customer in an expertise evoking some side of nature, akin to flowing water, birds in flight, or crowd kinetics. These marvelous installations are commanding and calming on the identical time, presumably as a result of they focus the thoughts, eye, and generally the ear.
MIT graduate scholar and MAD Fellow Caitlin Morris contributed idea design, design improvement, electrical design and engineering, firmware improvement, and fabrication to “Diffusion Choir,” an set up from the artist collaborative Hypersonic, in addition to Sosolimited and Plebian Design.
Video: Hypersonic
She did a lot of this work with New York-based Hypersonic, an organization of artists and technologists specializing in giant kinetic installations in public areas. Earlier than that, she earned a BS in psychology and a BS in architectural constructing sciences from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then an MFA in design and expertise from the Parsons College of Design at The New College.
Throughout, in between, after, and generally concurrently, she taught design, coding, and different applied sciences at the highschool, undergraduate, and graduate-student ranges.
“I feel what sort of obtained me hooked on educating was that the way in which I realized as a baby was not the identical as within the classroom,” Morris explains. “And I later noticed this in a lot of my college students. I obtained the sensation that the conventional means of studying issues was not working for them. They usually thought it was their fault. They only didn’t actually really feel welcome inside the conventional training mannequin.”
Morris says that when she labored with these college students, tossing apart custom and as a substitute saying — “You recognize, we’re simply going to do that animation. Or we’re going to make this design or this web site or these graphics, and we’re going to strategy it on this completely totally different means” — she noticed folks “type of unlock and be like, ‘Oh my gosh. I by no means thought I might try this.’
“For me, that was the hook, that’s the magic of it. As a result of I used to be coming from that have of getting to determine these unlock mechanisms for myself, it was actually thrilling to have the ability to share them with different folks, these unlock moments.”
For her doctoral work with the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group, she’s specializing in the non-public house and emotional gaps related to studying, notably on-line and AI-assisted studying. This analysis builds on her expertise rising human connection in each bodily and digital studying environments.
“I’m creating a framework that mixes AI-driven behavioral evaluation with human skilled evaluation to check social studying dynamics,” she says. “My analysis investigates how social interplay patterns affect curiosity improvement and intrinsic motivation in studying, with explicit give attention to understanding how these dynamics differ between actual friends and AI-supported environments.”
Step one in her analysis is figuring out which components of social interplay usually are not replaceable by an AI-based digital tutor. Following that evaluation, her aim is to construct a prototype platform for experiential studying.
“I’m creating instruments that may concurrently observe observable behaviors — like bodily actions, language cues, and interplay patterns — whereas capturing learners’ subjective experiences by way of reflection and interviews,” Morris explains. “This strategy helps join what folks do with how they really feel about their studying expertise.
“I purpose to make two major contributions: first, evaluation instruments for learning social studying dynamics; and second, prototype instruments that exhibit sensible approaches for supporting social curiosity in digital studying environments. These contributions might assist bridge the hole between the effectivity of digital platforms and the wealthy social interplay that happens in efficient in-person studying.”
Her targets make Morris an ideal match for the MIT MAD Fellowship. One assertion in MAD’s mission is: “Breaking away from conventional training, we foster creativity, crucial considering, making, and collaboration, exploring a variety of dynamic approaches to organize college students for complicated, real-world challenges.”
Morris desires to assist neighborhood organizations cope with the speedy AI-powered modifications in training, as soon as she finishes her doctorate in 2026. “What ought to we do with this ‘bodily house versus digital house’ divide?” she asks. That’s the house at present charming Morris’s ideas.
