Situating within Society: Blueprints and Strategies for Media Labs

Today’s digital society functions with principles and innovation developed at research labs around the world over the past 50 years. So called media labs have entered a phase of redefinition and soul searching. There is a concurrent proliferation of labs that parallel a broader take up of technological practice. They can be industry labs, art labs, university labs or labs embedded in local communities. While the notion of a media lab can be conveyed in one word, there is not a single definition of what constitutes a media laboratory. Meanwhile, with the rapid democratisation of technology, the social relevance and purpose of the media lab has shifted away from a purely technological focus to a societal one.