MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) Fellow Caitlin Morris is an architect, artist, researcher, and educator who has studied psychology and used online learning tools to show herself coding and other skills. She’s a soft-spoken observer, with a keen interest in how people use space and reply to their environments. Combining her observational skills with energetic community engagement, she works on the intersection of technology, education, and human connection to enhance digital learning platforms.
Morris grew up in rural upstate Latest York in a family of makers. She learned to stitch, cook, and construct things with wood at a young age. One among her earlier memories is of a small handsaw she made — with the assistance of her father, knowledgeable carpenter. It had wood handles on each side to make sawing easier for her.
Later, when she needed to learn something, she’d turn to project-based communities, quite than books. She taught herself to code late at night, benefiting from community-oriented platforms where people answer questions and post sketches, allowing her to see the code behind the objects people made.
“For me, that was this huge, wake-up moment of feeling like there was a path to expression that was not a conventional computer-science classroom,” she says. “I feel that’s partly why I feel so enthusiastic about what I’m doing now. That was the massive transformation: having that community available on this really personal, project-based way.”
Subsequently, Morris has turn into involved in community-based learning in diverse ways: She’s a co-organizer of the MIT Media Lab’s Festival of Learning; she leads creative coding community meetups; and she or he’s been energetic within the open-source software community development.
“My years of organizing learning and making communities — each in person and online — have shown me firsthand how powerful social interaction might be for motivation and curiosity,” Morris said. “My research is basically about identifying which elements of that social magic are most essential, so we are able to design digital environments that higher support those dynamics.”
Even in her artwork, Morris sometimes works with a collective. She’s contributed to the creation of about 10 large art installations that mix movement, sound, imagery, lighting, and other technologies to immerse the visitor in an experience evoking some aspect of nature, resembling flowing water, birds in flight, or crowd kinetics. These marvelous installations are commanding and calming at the identical time, possibly because they focus the mind, eye, and sometimes the ear.
MIT graduate student and MAD Fellow Caitlin Morris contributed concept design, design development, electrical design and engineering, firmware development, and fabrication to “Diffusion Choir,” an installation from the artist collaborative Hypersonic, in addition to Sosolimited and Plebian Design.
Video: Hypersonic
She did much of this work with Latest York-based Hypersonic, an organization of artists and technologists specializing in large kinetic installations in public spaces. 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 technology from the Parsons School of Design at The Latest School.
During, in between, after, and sometimes concurrently, she taught design, coding, and other technologies at the highschool, undergraduate, and graduate-student levels.
“I feel what type of got me hooked on teaching was that the way in which I learned as a baby was not the identical as within the classroom,” Morris explains. “And I later saw this in a lot of my students. I got the sensation that the traditional way of learning things was not working for them. And so they thought it was their fault. They simply didn’t really feel welcome inside the normal education model.”
Morris says that when she worked with those students, tossing aside tradition and as a substitute saying — “You recognize, we’re just going to do that animation. Or we’re going to make this design or this website or these graphics, and we’re going to approach it on this totally different way” — she saw people “type of unlock and be like, ‘Oh my gosh. I never thought I could try this.’
“For me, that was the hook, that’s the magic of it. Because I used to be coming from that have of getting to work out those unlock mechanisms for myself, it was really exciting to have the option 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 non-public space and emotional gaps related to learning, particularly online and AI-assisted learning. This research builds on her experience increasing human connection in each physical and virtual learning environments.
“I’m developing a framework that mixes AI-driven behavioral evaluation with human expert assessment to check social learning dynamics,” she says. “My research investigates how social interaction patterns influence curiosity development and intrinsic motivation in learning, with particular give attention to understanding how these dynamics differ between real peers and AI-supported environments.”
Step one in her research is determining which elements of social interaction will not be replaceable by an AI-based digital tutor. Following that assessment, her goal is to construct a prototype platform for experiential learning.
“I’m creating tools that may concurrently 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, evaluation tools for studying social learning dynamics; and second, prototype tools that reveal 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 wealthy social interaction that happens in effective in-person learning.”
Her goals make Morris an ideal fit for the MIT MAD Fellowship. One statement in MAD’s mission is: “Breaking away from traditional education, we foster creativity, critical pondering, making, and collaboration, exploring a variety of dynamic approaches to organize students for complex, real-world challenges.”
Morris desires to help community organizations take care of the rapid AI-powered changes in education, once she finishes her doctorate in 2026. “What should we do with this ‘physical space versus virtual space’ divide?” she asks. That’s the space currently fascinating Morris’s thoughts.
