V. Michael Bove, Jr.

My passion is working in an environment in which learning happens constantly—where students and faculty members learn things from one another, exchanging information with our sponsors and the world at large. And we do so in an environment devoid of seemingly arbitrary limitations....

It's time we took seriously the topic of time travel. Not in the quantum-mechanics sense, but in the sense of better supporting communication, expression, learning, and collaboration among people who are separated temporally, and in the sense of removing the sharp divide between "live" and "recorded," which all too often involve different devices, applications, interfaces, and even etiquette. Ultimately people should be able to transition seamlessly—and in many cases invisibly—between asynchronous and synchronous communication.

This isn't accomplished through a clever user-interface hack, but rather by learning what the users are trying to accomplish, designing communication systems that gain an understanding of what they're communicating, and then using this understanding to create richer connections among the people at the ends of the system. What makes this a Media-Lab-style project is that the goal is not to make better voice mail, or chatrooms, or collaborative-work software, but rather to extend the freedom from time constraints into physical spaces and all aspects of life.

> Full Essay