For centuries diplomas have been synonymous with the nation’s universities.

That makes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s decision to name a 44-year old Japanese venture capitalist who attended, but did not graduate, from two American colleges as the director of one of the world’s top computing science laboratories an unusual choice.

On Tuesday, the university plans to announce that Joichi Ito, known as Joi, will become the fourth director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, which was originally founded by the architect Nicholas Negroponte in 1985 and has since become recognized for its willingness to take risks in developing technologies that are at the edge of the computing frontier.

The Media Laboratory gained a global reputation during the 1990s as an avant-garde research center known for stunning high-technology demonstrations that pointed toward a future digital society.

Indeed, the Media Lab has on occasion been criticized for overemphasizing flashy demos. During the 1990s, under Dr. Negroponte, the lab evolved a research culture of “demo or die,” rather than the standard academic “publish or perish” model.