Compare a crowded urban mall and a crowded college campus. The mall has designer clothes, the smell of fast food, and roving groups of young people. The campus has classrooms, the smell of fast food, and roving groups of young people.

At first glance, they appear to be nearly the same: communities of people with similar goals. At the mall, it's entertainment. At the campus, it's education. But the campus supports deep community. The mall is simply a staging area.

One of the strongest essentials of community is the ability to connect with others. That's why the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a program called StudioMIT, in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, who created an "academical village" at the University of Virginia to support a community of students and faculty living and working together in the same space. However, StudioMIT goes beyond the mere physical space that Jefferson envisioned to create an online community that can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

"We think of the studio environment as very much a community, a community of learning in which things happen at a lot of different levels," says Bill Mitchell, the Dean of the Architectural Department at MIT. "It's been traditional since the 19th century."

The core of StudioMIT, which is partially funded by the iCampus program�an alliance between at Microsoft Research and MIT, is an open-ended collection of continually updated searchable databases. "StudioMIT is basically a Web site used to build communities within the department of Architecture at MIT," says Susan Yee, who worked at Microsoft Research as an intern, and is now responsible for the day-to-day management of StudioMIT.

"StudioMIT uses educational policies to build on the strengths of the studio method and the design community. The strength of the studio method is its focus on design problems that are ill defined and don't really have a right or wrong answer. It's about creative synthesis and establishing a critical discussion about and around work. And that's how we geared our Web site. It becomes a place where students and faculty can put their courseware, where students can put out their design work and we try to build discussions around them," says Yee.

All community members have individual online workspaces where they can access digital image collections, community and class workspaces, and exhibition spaces. However, the best part is the ability each student has to interact with other students to discuss what they're learning and to exchange news, share resources, and work on group projects together.

The donation of laptops for the students helped spur the development of StudioMIT. "Introducing wireless laptops was enormously important because it makes the computational resources in the studio available without imposing any restrictions with how people group together to discuss things and accomplish projects. That's spatial freedom," says Mitchell.

From Shopping Mall to MIT
While the professors at MIT were researching the link between technology and the studio method, two groups at Microsoft Research (MSR) were also looking for ways to help people collaborate and connect. The Social Computing group, where Susan Yee interned, and the System and Networking group had been collaborating on a project developed by Victor Bahl.

Bahl developed a technology that allows users to physically locate and track their buddies who are using the same laptop system. His technology, code-named WISH, is a radio-frequency based system that uses an 802.11 wireless network. The system presents the location information in a graphical form on a building map, and it can also send alerts or notifications preset by the user.

Bahl originally tested his system at a local shopping mall. Unfortunately, though the system worked fine, he didn't find a horde of users lining up to try it out. The problem, according to Lili Cheng, the manager of the Social Computing group, is that "most people don't carry laptops in the mall, except maybe a few Microsoft employees. Most shoppers like talking to friends or people with common interests, but not necessarily strangers looking into laptops."

However, Cheng, who was a former architect, knew that Bahl's research would be perfect for students who needed to find each other to work on collaborative projects - say, students who were studying architecture at MIT.

These ideas launched the new StudioBridge project, a joint research project between MIT and MSR. StudioBridge uses the WISH technology and the talents of Susan Yee and Shaomin Wang, another Microsoft Research intern.

"The design studio course is the center of the architectural education. Groups of about 10-12 people work together in an open studio environment," explains Cheng. "Classes are typically held three days a week for four hours in the studio, but students study in and around the studio all night, almost every night, designing their projects and working together. Students might meet in the cafeteria near the studio and start sketching on napkins, or pinning up drawings in hallways for informal discussions. This intense working environment creates a very close social group. We thought it would be very interesting to see how different studio groups use their new laptops, the wireless network, and the WISH software, and how this would impact the learning process - maybe you get an alert when half of your group was meeting at the studio late at night for instance. You could say, 'oh, a bunch of people are there, maybe I should go and drop in."

Beyond the Ten Pavilions
Jefferson's "academical village" concept was revolutionary�for the time. The ten pavilions that acted as a framework for the village were the epitome of democratic learning, thought it was still a limited system designed for an elite group.

The technical aspects of StudioMIT allow a greater reach, a greater ability to include students from around the world.

"We use telecommunication capabilities to bring in people electronically to serve as design critics who otherwise wouldn't be able to get access to establish contacts with people like fabricators and someone we might want to work collaboratively with. And we do a lot of geographically distributed collaborative projects working with students in other countries. There's a specific point to that because we want to have students learn how to operate in cross-cultural environments and to deal with issues that have a dimension of people framing the issue cross-culturally in very different ways from themselves," says Mitchell.

StudioMIT eases fears that technology will eliminate the human element. StudioMIT and StudioBridge actually enhance community and make communication between members easier.

"This is directly about people," states Mitchell. "One good way to say it is that traditionally we've relied on the physical setting of the studio to generate the sense of community, just the fact of people being in there many hours a day working together is a very powerful thing. The electronic stuff doesn't replace that, it enriches that. We keep weaving this web of interconnections."