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.

As a fundamental element of design, static form, as well as its fabrication techniques, have been explored since ancient time. We try to change the static nature of form in design, and develop dynamic and transformative material as media.

For this project, you are free to form new groups or stay with your existing ones. Please ask the TAs for help

Deliverables

At the core of this project is the goal to create a (at least partially functional) prototype. You are welcome to use any technology/material that facilitates the functionalities you envisioned. Never be

Documentation 

• Create (at least) 4 GIFs of your Prototype
• 3 GIFs have to show the actual prototype and his functionality
• 1 GIF may extend on future functionality/aesthetics
• Video is optional

Presentation (in December 2. Class)

Presentation of your project as a team. Each team will have about 15 minutes to present its project and 10 minutes of Q & A.

• Slideshow with motivation, related projects (ACM digital library is a good place to start), design rationale and usage scenarios.
• Prototype that is at least partly functional
• (Optional) video demonstrating the complete scenarios

Online (deadline December 2. 1pm)

Create a page entry in the category Project 2: SHAPE AS MEDIA including the following things

• Title of the Project
• Abstract
• Group Members & Roles
•  4 gifs

Report (deadline December 12th 12pm)

• Please compile the final results into a SIGCHI Extended Abstract Format.
• Upload to the webpage with a link.