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 lively neighborhood engagement, she works on the intersection of expertise, schooling, 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 reminiscences is of a small handsaw she made — with the assistance of her father, an expert carpenter. It had picket 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, relatively 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 big, wake-up second of feeling like there was a path to expression that was not a standard computer-science classroom,” she says. “I feel that’s partly why I really feel so obsessed with what I’m doing now. That was the large transformation: having that neighborhood accessible on this actually private, project-based manner.”
Subsequently, Morris has turn out to be concerned in community-based studying in numerous methods: She’s a co-organizer of the MIT Media Lab’s Pageant of Studying; she leads artistic coding neighborhood meetups; and she or he’s been lively 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 could be for motivation and curiosity,” Morris stated. “My analysis is de facto about figuring out which components of that social magic are most important, so we will design digital environments that higher help these dynamics.”
Even in her paintings, Morris typically 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, equivalent to flowing water, birds in flight, or crowd kinetics. These marvelous installations are commanding and calming on the identical time, probably as a result of they focus the thoughts, eye, and typically the ear.
MIT graduate pupil 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 typically concurrently, she taught design, coding, and different applied sciences at the highschool, undergraduate, and graduate-student ranges.
“I feel what sort of acquired me hooked on instructing was that the way in which I realized as a toddler was not the identical as within the classroom,” Morris explains. “And I later noticed this in lots of my college students. I acquired the sensation that the traditional manner 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 schooling mannequin.”
Morris says that when she labored with these college students, tossing apart custom and as an alternative saying — “, 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 method it on this completely completely different manner” — she noticed folks “form of unlock and be like, ‘Oh my gosh. I by no means thought I may do 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 private house and emotional gaps related to studying, significantly on-line and AI-assisted studying. This analysis builds on her expertise growing human connection in each bodily and digital studying environments.
“I’m growing a framework that mixes AI-driven behavioral evaluation with human knowledgeable evaluation to review social studying dynamics,” she says. “My analysis investigates how social interplay patterns affect curiosity improvement and intrinsic motivation in studying, with specific 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 should not replaceable by an AI-based digital tutor. Following that evaluation, her objective is to construct a prototype platform for experiential studying.
“I’m creating instruments that may concurrently monitor observable behaviors — like bodily actions, language cues, and interplay patterns — whereas capturing learners’ subjective experiences by way of reflection and interviews,” Morris explains. “This method helps join what folks do with how they really feel about their studying expertise.
“I goal to make two main contributions: first, evaluation instruments for learning social studying dynamics; and second, prototype instruments that display sensible approaches for supporting social curiosity in digital studying environments. These contributions may assist bridge the hole between the effectivity of digital platforms and the wealthy social interplay that happens in efficient in-person studying.”
Her objectives make Morris an ideal match for the MIT MAD Fellowship. One assertion in MAD’s mission is: “Breaking away from conventional schooling, we foster creativity, essential pondering, making, and collaboration, exploring a variety of dynamic approaches to organize college students for complicated, real-world challenges.”
Morris desires to assist neighborhood organizations take care of the speedy AI-powered adjustments in schooling, 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 presently charming Morris’s ideas.
