My Morningide Academy for Design (Crazy) Fellow Caitlin Morris is an architect, artist, researcher and educator who studies psychology and used online learning tools to code herself and teach other skills. She is a quietly spoken observer with great interest in how people use space and react to their environments. She combines her remark skills with lively commitment in the neighborhood and works on the interface of technology, education and human connection to enhance digital learning platforms.
Morris grew up in a family of makers in the agricultural state of New York. She learned to stitch, cook and construct with wood at a young age. One of her earlier memories is a small hand saw that she did – with the assistance of her father, knowledgeable carpenter. It had picket handles on each side to make it easier to saw it.
Later, when she needed to learn something, she turned to project -based communities slightly than in books. She taught herself late at night, coding late at night, using community-oriented platforms where people answer questions and post sketches in order that she will be able to see the code behind the objects that individuals made.
“For me it was this huge, awakening moment of feeling that there was a way that was not a standard computer science classroom,” she says. “I believe that’s partly the rationale why I feel so captivated with what I'm doing now. That was the good transformation: to have this community available to this really personal, project -based way.”
Afterwards, Morris has been involved within the community-based learning in quite a lot of ways: she is a co-organizer of the educational festival of the with Media Lab; It leads creative coding community meeting; And it was lively within the open source software community development.
“My years of organization of learning and the production of communities – each personally and online – showed me first -hand how strong social interaction for motivation and curiosity will be,” said Morris. “My research is admittedly about determining which elements of this social magic are most significant in order that we will design digital environments that higher support this dynamic.”
Even in her murals, Morris sometimes works with a collective. It has contributed to the creation of about 10 large art installations that combined the movement, sound, pictures, lighting and other technologies as a way to immerse the visitor into an experience that causes a facet of nature, reminiscent of flowing water, flying in a flight or the kinetics of the group. These wonderful installations command and calm at the identical time, possibly because they concentrate the mind, the attention and sometimes the ear.
The concept design, design development, electrical design and engineering, firmware development and manufacture for the “diffusion -choir”, a installation of the artistic collaborative hypers in addition to Sosolimited and Plebian Design controlled with -doktorand and MAD colleague Caitlin Morris.
Video: Hyperschall
She has done a big a part of this work with Hyperic in New York, a society of artists and technologists who concentrate on large kinetic installations in public spaces. Before that, she acquired a BS in psychology and a BS in architectural constructing sciences from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then an MFA within the design and technology of the Parsons School of Design at the brand new school.
During, in between, she taught in the highschool, within the Bachelor and Graduate students, in between and sometimes at the identical time design, coding and other technologies.
“I believe what made me hooked on teach was that the best way I learned as a baby was not the identical as within the classroom,” explains Morris. “And I later saw this with lots of my students. I felt that the traditional way of learning things didn’t work for them. And they thought it was their fault. They just didn't really feel welcome in the normal educational model.”
Morris says when she worked with these students, tradition threw aside and as an alternative said: “You know that we’ll only do that animation. Or we are going to create this design or this website or these graphics and we are going to approach it in a totally different way.” She saw the people, “somewhat activated and the way”, my God said, I never thought.
“For me that was the catch, that’s the magic of it. Because I got here from this experience to seek out out these activation mechanisms for myself, it was really exciting to have the ability to share them with other people, these free -shell moments.”
For her doctoral thesis with the Fluid Interfaces group of the with Media Lab, she focuses on personal space and the emotional gaps related to learning, specifically online and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa haps. This research builds on its experience, which increases the human connection in each physical and virtual learning environments.
“I develop a framework that mixes a AI-controlled behavioral evaluation with the evaluation of the human expert as a way to examine social learning dynamics,” she says. “My research examines how social interaction patterns influence curiosity and intrinsic motivation in learning, with a specific concentrate on understanding how this dynamic differs between real colleagues and AI supported environments.”
The first step in your research is to find out which elements of social interaction should not replaced by an AI-based digital tutor. According to this assessment, your goal is to construct a prototype platform for experimental learning.
“I create tools that may pursue observable behaviors reminiscent of physical actions, language and interaction patterns and at the identical time capture the subjective experiences of the learners through reflection and interviews,” explains Morris. “This approach combines what people do with how they feel about their learning experience.
“I would love to make two primary contributions: firstly evaluation tools for the investigation of social lerry dynamics. Secondly, prototype tools that show practical approaches to support social curiosity in digital learning environments. These contributions could help to shut the gap between the efficiency of digital platforms and the wealthy social interaction that happens in effective personal learning.”
Your goals make Morris perfect for the with MAD community. A press release in Mad's mission is: “We promote creativity, critical pondering, the production and cooperation to look at quite a few dynamic approaches to arrange the scholars for complex, real challenges.”
Morris desires to help community organizations cope with the fast AI-powered changes in education as soon because it ended her doctorate in 2026. She asks. That is the space that Morris is currently fascinating.
