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MIT Media Lab Europe: An Obituary

Posted by michael on from the flew-too-close-to-the-sun dept.

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."

2 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. I think I know why it closed by krog · · Score: 4, Funny

    Perhaps being right next to the Guinness brewery explains why not much work was done there.

    --
    Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
  2. Media Lab, RIP already by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I must prefix my bashing with an apology. I have friends at Media Lab Europe and they are nice, smart, and fun people. I hope you all find new jobs.

    The media lab concept is to make a pretty toy with an amusing concept, and call it brilliant (demo or die!). The painful part is that despite looking really cool, many of these toys and instruments are nothing more than that, toys. All of the crap musical instruments, and artistic looking mobiles, as far as I'm concerned are worthless other then kitch value. Most of the concepts are not new and other than eye candy aspects have been done more completely. The end result has been that they have failed to push boundaries, failed to advance the state of the art, and seemingly failed to have any lasting value, other than to inflate the already gigantic ego of the institution.

    I hear your cries already. " But what about this one example yada yada yada..." The fact of the matter is the world doesn't need a bunch of hyped egos running around spending unimaginable sums of money. The research community can do better than the media lab. We are doing better. With less money, less ego, and in the name of science, not profit. I spose we don't all have machined plastic demos with videos of children happily playing across internet 2 in 4 countries.

    Oh well, RIP