MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) Fellow Caitlin Morris is an architect, artist, researcher, and educator who has studied psychology and used online learning instruments to educate 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 improve digital learning platforms.
Morris grew up in rural upstate New York in a household of makers. She realized to sew, cook dinner, and construct issues with wooden at a younger age. One of her earlier recollections is of a small handsaw she made — with the assistance of her father, knowledgeable carpenter. It had picket handles on either side to make sawing simpler for her.
Later, when she wanted to study one thing, she’d flip to project-based communities, quite 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 huge, wake-up moment of feeling like there was a path to expression that was not a traditional computer-science classroom,” she says. “I think that’s partly why I feel so passionate about what I’m doing now. That was the big transformation: having that community available in this really personal, project-based way.”
Subsequently, Morris has change into concerned in community-based learning in numerous methods: She’s a co-organizer of the MIT Media Lab’s Festival of Learning; she leads inventive coding neighborhood meetups; and she’s been lively within the open-source software program neighborhood growth.
“My years of organizing learning and making communities — both in person and online — have shown me firsthand how powerful social interaction can be for motivation and curiosity,” Morris mentioned. “My research is really about identifying which elements of that social magic are most essential, so we can design digital environments that better support those dynamics.”
Even in her art work, Morris generally works with a collective. She’s contributed to the creation of about 10 massive 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 generally the ear.
MIT graduate scholar and MAD Fellow Caitlin Morris contributed idea design, design growth, electrical design and engineering, firmware growth, 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 massive kinetic installations in public areas. Before 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 School of Design at The New School.
During, in between, after, and generally concurrently, she taught design, coding, and different applied sciences at the highschool, undergraduate, and graduate-student ranges.
“I think what kind of got me hooked on teaching was that the way I learned as a child was not the same as in the classroom,” Morris explains. “And I later saw this in many of my students. I got the feeling that the normal way of learning things was not working for them. And they thought it was their fault. They just didn’t really feel welcome within the traditional education model.”
Morris says that when she labored with these college students, tossing apart custom and as a substitute saying — “You know, we’re just going to do this animation. Or we’re going to make this design or this website or these graphics, and we’re going to approach it in this totally different way” — she noticed folks “kind of unlock and be like, ‘Oh my gosh. I never thought I could do that.’
“For me, that was the hook, that’s the magic of it. Because I was coming from that experience of having to figure out those unlock mechanisms for myself, it was really exciting to be able to share them with other people, those 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 learning, significantly online and AI-assisted learning. This analysis builds on her expertise rising human connection in each bodily and digital learning environments.
“I’m developing a framework that combines AI-driven behavioral analysis with human expert assessment to study social learning dynamics,” she says. “My research investigates how social interaction patterns influence curiosity development and intrinsic motivation in learning, with particular focus on understanding how these dynamics differ between real peers and AI-supported environments.”
The first step in her analysis is figuring out which parts of social interplay should not replaceable by an AI-based digital tutor. Following that evaluation, her aim is to construct a prototype platform for experiential learning.
“I’m creating tools that can simultaneously track observable behaviors — like physical actions, language cues, and interaction patterns — while capturing learners’ subjective experiences through reflection and interviews,” Morris explains. “This approach helps connect what people do with how they feel about their learning experience.
“I aim to make two primary contributions: first, analysis tools for studying social learning dynamics; and second, prototype tools that demonstrate practical approaches for supporting social curiosity in digital learning environments. These contributions could help bridge the gap between the efficiency of digital platforms and the rich social interaction that occurs in effective in-person learning.”
Her targets make Morris an ideal match for the MIT MAD Fellowship. One assertion in MAD’s mission is: “Breaking away from traditional education, we foster creativity, critical thinking, making, and collaboration, exploring a range of dynamic approaches to prepare students for complex, real-world challenges.”
Morris desires to assist neighborhood organizations cope with the speedy AI-powered adjustments in schooling, as soon as she finishes her doctorate in 2026. “What should we do with this ‘physical space versus virtual space’ divide?” she asks. That is the house at present charming Morris’s ideas.