Hiroshi Ishii is the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, at the MIT Media Lab. He joined the MIT Media Lab in October 1995, and founded the Tangible Media Group. He currently directs the Tangible Media Group, and he co-directs the Things That Think (TTT) consortium.

Hiroshi’s research focuses upon the design of seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment. His team seeks to change the “painted bits” of GUIs to “tangible bits” by giving physical form to digital information.
In 2012, he presented the new vision “Radical Atoms” to take a leap beyond “Tangible Bits” by assuming a hypothetical generation of materials that can change form and appearance dynamically, becoming as reconfigurable as pixels on a screen.

Ishii and his team have presented their visions of “Tangible Bits” and “Radical Atoms” at a variety of academic, design, and artistic venues (including ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, AIGA, Ars Electronica, ICC, Centre Pompidou, and Victoria and Albert Museum), emphasizing that the development of tangible interfaces requires the rigor of both scientific and artistic review.

For this work, he was awarded tenure from MIT in 2001, and elected to the CHI Academy in 2006 recognizing his substantial contributions to the field of Human-Computer Interactions through the creation of new genre called “Tangible User Interfaces.”

Prior to MIT, from 1988-1994, he led a CSCW research group at the NTT Human Interface
Laboratories, where his team invented TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard. In 1993
and 1994, he was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Canada.

He served as an Associate Editor of ACM TOCHI (Transactions on Computer Human
Interactions) and ACM TOIS (Transactions on Office Information Systems). He also
serves as a program committee member of many international conferences including
ACM CHI, CSCW, UIST, SIGGRAPH, Multimedia, Interact, ISMAR, and ECSCW.

He received B. E. degree in electronic engineering, M. E. and Ph. D. degrees in computer engineering from Hokkaido University, Japan, in 1978, 1980 and 1992, respectively.

Philipp is an Interaction Designer from Germany and currently a research assistant and MS candidate in the Tangible Media Group. He enjoys exploring idiosyncrasies in technologies and is interested in finding new and innovative ways how physical objects and smart materials can convey information in a meaningful and contextual manner.

Prior to joining the Tangible Media Group Philipp worked as a research assistant for Disney Research and as a designer for the Berlin based agency ART+COM. He received his Master’s in Visual Communication from the Berlin University of the Arts.

His work is also documented on his personal portfolio: www.bimster.com

Basheer Tome is a hardware interface designer and masters student in the Tangible Media group of the MIT Media Lab. His early work focused on remote collaboration and creating more clever, useful, digitally-native household appliances from toasters to timers.

Prior to joining the Media Lab, he received a B.S. in Industrial Design from the Georgia Institute of Technology and worked at Google in various capacities from user experience design on the Hangouts video chat application to interaction research for Google[x], designing both software and hardware to prototype new digital and physical interactions.

View more of his work in his portfolio at: http://basheertome.com/

Felix is an interaction designer and explorer from Germany. Currently he is a research assistant and MS candidate at the Tangible Media Group | MIT Media Lab. He is interested in how digital materiality and programmable materials can change interaction with digital models and information.

Prior to joining the Media Lab, Felix received a B.S. in Digital Media at the University of Bremen [Germany] and worked for Meso in Frankfurt. His earlier work revolves around tangible play and the digital extension of physical games.

More of his work can be seen on his portfolio: http://f3-h.de/