MIT Media Lab Europe: An Obituary

David R writes "Media Lab Europe, offspring of the famous MIT Media Lab, is closing its doors forever, as announced today. The corporate funding strategy hasn't worked out. Strangled by the stopped river of Irish government funding, the lab ceases its operations. Having worked there for quite some time, I can give you the gory details and a lot of background on MLE's closure. It has sure been the fanciest, geekiest and most open work, research and play environment I've seen. The moral? I think it is questionable whether basic or visionary, interdisciplinary (and often badly evaluated) research will be funded by private corporations. But secondly, European companies need a culture of sponsorship, which has existed in America for a long time."

Comments

Haven't we learned?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't just take American things and slap Euro* on them and expect them to work. Remember Euro Disney?

Sponsorship

[njfuzzy]

I went to school in the UK for four years, and I didn't see any signs that Europe has less sponsorship by business. Quite a lot of Universities had labs tied to businesses, research students were paid by businesses, and so forth.

Expensive

[drwho]

The problem is that it's just too expensive. MIT ex-president Vest had a very dot-com attitude towards spending, having investing a lot of the Universities money in very questionable companies with a lot of prestige, and many projects of quaint but questionable utility. Anyone who knows the story of the Stata building (a.k.a. the Gates building), that expensive, ugly, leaking monstrosity, can tell you MIT has made mistakes.

My feeling is the MLE was one of them. Dublin has become a VERY expensive place to live and do business. This is especially true if your capital pool is is dollars. Cambridge (Massachusetts, home of MIT) is expensive too, but not as expensive as Dublin.

Back in the 1960s, the Media Lab was a place of innovation because of the people involved, not the amount of money thrown at it. Since then, there have been a number of prima donnas who want the newest, best stuff. The formerly very drrop pockets of MIT made them used to getting what they demanded. But the pockets are light now. It's no surprise that the most remote wings of the organization will be the first to get clipped.

If I were running an organization such as the Media Lab, what I would do is NOT to try to shift focus on more commercially viable projects. There's enough commercial labs out there, doing a good job on this. What I would do is find a way run it on a shoestring budget. For instance, just up the street from that horrible Stata building are the old, empty and decaying Polaroid buildings. Those could have been bought and made useable for a fraction of the money it took to build Stata (yes, I know, State is an endowed building. Still, they could have done it). Instead of picking Dublin for RLE, pick a cheaper part of Europe that is less likely to skyrocket in costs because of its small size. But a country that is stable and has a good infrastructure. Someplace like the eastern part of Germany where you can buy land really cheap, and the government has a very long-term view towards helping the economy.

And trim down those salaries! There's no need to be demanding $130k/year when you can buy a nice house for $80k.

To summarize: cheaper area, less glitz, lower salaries, but still a playground for the mind.

Re:Expensive

[Bozdune]

As an MIT alum, I can assure you that there was no "Media Lab" in 1979, so there almost assuredly was no "Media Lab" in the 60's.

Your cost point is valid, except that the buildings replaced by the Stata Center were in pretty rough shape themselves. The old Building 20, which I remember well, was a series of three-story wooden structures built as "temporary lab space" in the war years (WW II). It had to be replaced with SOMETHING. You can love Stata or hate it, but if you're going to have an Architecture Department (which MIT does), you're going to try something new and different if you have the chance. So they did.

With regard to picking up the Polaroid buildings, historically it hasn't been so easy for MIT and other Cambridge, Massachusetts educational institutions to move outside their current boundaries. The Cambridge City Council, long dominated by blue-collar types, has always wanted Cambridge to retain its light manufacturing roots, and has always resisted (through zoning, the real power in all city government) the expansion of the colleges. That's why Kendall Square was a FNML (fucking no-man's land) for 35 years, until the battle finally turned MIT's way.

There are other examples of this -- the button factory on Amherst Street that finally became MIT's, Building E40, the apartments on Vassar Street that MIT wasn't allowed to own until a 20 year period had elapsed, and so on.

So it isn't always that easy to just move into empty buildings, especially in the People's Republic of Cambridge.

No, the dot.coms imiitated the Media Lab

[peter303]

The Media Lab was an amalgamation of the MIT Architecture studios and the Computer Science Lab. Both places had used the "playpen" environments since the 1960s. The architecture labs inter-penetrated the top floor of Building 7 Borg infiltrating the Enterprise. People built interconnected, multi-level cubby holes and common areas for their art studios and classrooms.

Many dot.coms adopted this style of goofy shared spaces. You still see this at Google, Pixar, etc.

This atmosphere has recently extended to the newly opened "Dr. Suess" Computer Science Department (Strata) building at MIT. This building looks like a bunch of twisty towers. Theres a lot weird looking offices, common spaces and passage ways. Plus its own gym and cafeteria, so students rarely need to return home.