MediaLAB Amsterdam is now the Digital Society School! You are viewing an archive of MediaLAB projects. Content on this website may be outdated, and is without guarantee.

Citizen Empowerment

MediaLAB Amsterdam is part of CREATE-IT, the research department of the School of Digital Media and Creative Industries of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. All of our projects share a focus on CREATE-IT’s umbrella theme of ‘citizen empowerment’.

The rise of digital media and the advent of the network society have shifted the relations between citizens on the one hand and companies and governments on the other. Citizens have new tools to organize themselves around issues of communal interest. The relation between professionals and citizens is shifting. This means both citizens as well as institutional parties and companies are looking for new relationships and new roles in society.

These developments raise questions such as “What impact does the rise of digital media technologies have on society?”, “How can digital media be designed to optimise benefits for citizens?”, “How can professionals from a wide range of domains and fields – from fashion to musea, from policy-makers to game-designers – serve their public in new ways?”, and “What societal risks do these developments have?”.

MediaLAB Amsterdam aims to operationalise these and other questions and create proof-of-concepts and prototypes that help support research around this theme.