[ericjang]

I can't speak for all of her lab's work (a lab's output is far more than the Principal Investigator's contributions), but I really am inspired by the potential applications of high-resolution voxel printing developed by the group [1]. Only such beauty can inspire the sci-fi hope of high-capacity memory storage, new computational paradigms [2]

As another commenter mentions, I do think it is productive to discuss the line with which something is no longer "rigorous" enough to be considered science. The caveat is that these discussions should be made by the lab doing the work, not by the Internet peanut gallery.

Media Lab's "research" resembles constructive science rather than deductive science (how does the world work?). We normally forgive science papers for doing engineering when they present something that is immediately useful to humanity (e.g. TensorFlow whitepaper). Artists (fashion designers, creatives, etc.) often make cool demos but fall short "revolutionary" products because the fabrication technology is not ready yet for their ideas. It still has a place, though, in science - if only to suggest unorthodox ways of approaching scientific inquiry.

At the very least, these works realize thought-provoking concepts a step farther than most of us are willing to commit to -- chatting about it on the Internet.

FWIW, my day job is doing science, if that lends my comment any credibility.

[1] http://matter.media.mit.edu/publications/article/making-data...

[2] https://twitter.com/ericjang11/status/1003471515323494405