Digital Nations: A New Research Consortium at the MIT Media Laboratory

Despite the incredible technological advances of the past decade, the digital revolution has yet to touch the lives of most people in most parts of the world. Even where new technologies are available, they have had only minimal impact on the great social needs of our times: improving education, reducing poverty, enhancing health care, supporting community development.

The MIT Media Laboratory is establishing a new research consortium, called Digital Nations, that will focus explicitly on these major social challenges. Researchers at the Media Lab will collaborate with people around the world, aiming to catalyze social changes that are dramatic but also humanistic, sustainable, and resonant with local needs.

The Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University will act as a collaborating partner in the Digital Nations consortium. The Media Lab collaboration with the CID brings together a world-class collection of researchers and practitioners combining expertise in digital technologies, learning, and international development.

The Digital Nations consortium does not aim to impose solutions but rather to empower people in all walks of life to invent their own solutions. The consortium will develop a new generation of technologies and applications that enable people to design, create, and learn in new ways, helping them become more active participants in their societies.

The consortium will focus especially on populations with the greatest needs — children and the elderly, underserved communities and developing nations. The consortium will test out ideas and technologies in pilot projects around the world, helping individuals and communities develop innovative strategies in domains ranging from commerce to agriculture to health care — and, more broadly, transform the ways they learn and develop.

The consortium’s ultimate goal is a world full of creative people who are constantly exploring, experimenting, and inventing new opportunities for themselves and their societies.