design | What Is A Media Lab?

Tag / design

April 17, 2018

An Interview with Professor Bo Reimer of Medea Lab

March 2018

 1) What is your lab called and where is it?  

It is called MEDEA LAB MALMÖ, and it is located in Malmö, Sweden, as part of Malmö University. It started in 2009. It grew out of the work conducted within the School of Arts and Communication, which started in 1998 when Malmö University was inaugurated.

2) What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?  

We deal with societal challenges through experiments and interventions. The focus is on what we term collaborative media, [as well as] on design, and public engagement. We combine critical and theoretical work with design and arts based practices.

3) Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for seminars?  

It is primarily a research lab. About 30 researchers from Malmö University are involved in the work. Researchers come from fields such as Media and Communication Studies, Media Technology, Interaction Design, Design Theory, Computer Science, Comparative Literature and Art History. The work is carried out in collaboration with students and with researchers from other universities, and with people from outside academia belonging to public sector organizations, civil society organizations, the culture sector, and the creative industries.

“Living Archives”: opening the process of archiving so that it embraces contemporary practices associated with open data, social networking, mobile media, storytelling, gaming, and performance.

In addition to research, there is an outreach part of Medea. We have by now arranged more than 40 public lectures in our Medea Talks series, and more than 20 podcasts in our Medea Vox series. Speakers include Dick Hebdige, Lucy Suchman, Nick Montfort, Joanna Zylinska, Jay Bolter and Susan Schuppli.

August 28, 2016

An Interview with Professor Claudia Mareis and Dr Jamie Allen from the Critical Media Lab, Basel

The lab is a space where things are unready, unfinished, at risk and without known utility. The common root of ‘lab’ and ‘labour’ is also helpful in that it evokes an active, physical space with bodies in it doing things (which can be a rare thing in the hallowed but empty halls of academia).

An interview with Professor Claudia Mareis and Dr Jamie Allen from the Critical Media Lab in Basel.

“We need places, laboratories, fundamental labs to discuss the terminology, the conceptual schemes, the pedagogies, and the value systems. We need to work on this. This is what the humanities should be doing. Fundamental research like they are doing in the labs.” — Rosi Braidotti

How do you characterise the Critical Media Lab’s work and mission statement; what are the defining characteristics of what you do?

The Critical Media Lab is a place, a physical location and discursive locale, where we attempt to strike a balance between research, writing and reflection that critically examines our contemporary and historical practices of media, design, art and technology, while allowing space and physical resources for these practices themselves. Simply put, production, in the sense of actually producing something that is not a research paper, book or essay format reflection on some other practice (as writing, after all, is also a practice) should not necessitate either tacit or explicit support of the means, techniques or technologies of that production. Making media doesn’t mean you are ‘for’ more media in the world, and having knowledge of the institutional, organisational, social and political effects of media, technology and design making should allow for more, not less, reflexive practice in these areas. McLuhan once quipped regarding his own status as a reluctant hero of media studies how talking about something does not mean you are in favour of it.^[1] Making, doing and practicing media, art and design, although productive, need not be productivist in the sense of exacerbating the logics of mass-media, corporate or ahistorical techno-capitalism.