Research
Space Exploration Initiative

Space Exploration Initiative
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Conformable Decoders

Converting the patterns of nature and the human body into beneficial signals and energy
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Biomechatronics

Enhancing human physical capability
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Tangible Media

Seamlessly coupling the worlds of bits and atoms by giving dynamic physical form to digital information and computation
Project Research

3DKnITS: Three-dimensional Knitted Intelligent Textile Sensor

Three-dimensional Digital Knitting of Intelligent Textile Sensor for Activity Recognition and Biomechanical MonitoringWe present an ap…
Article Research

What the well-dressed spacecraft will be wearing

Spacecraft wrapped in sensor-rich electronic textiles could double as scientific instruments
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Responsive Environments

Augmenting and mediating human experience, interaction, and perception with sensor networks
Project Research

SensorNets

SensorNets: Towards Reconfigurable Multifunctional Fine-grained  Soft and Stretchable Electronic Skins.SensorNets is a bioin…
Project Research

Space Fabrics: resilient electronic textiles for distributed sensing in low Earth orbit

Overview: The outermost skin of a space-based structure is designed using materials known to protect against the harsh elements of space. S…
Archived
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Object-Based Media

Changing storytelling, communication, and everyday life through sensing, understanding, and new interface technologies
Archived
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Mediated Matter

Designing for, with, and by nature
Article Research

Smart textiles sense how their users are moving

Researchers develop a comfortable, form-fitting fabric that recognizes its wearer’s activities, like walking, running, and jumping.
Project Research

Tapis Magique: A Choreomusical Interactive Carpet

Ancient textiles have played a major role in the social, economic, and religious structures of communities around the world. Iconic, indige…
Article Research

Helping dairy farmers raise healthy cows

Labby has developed an optical milk scanner based on materials-sensing technology that dairy farmers can use to measure their cows' health.
Project Research

KnittedKeyboard II

Spanning from the early Musical Telegraph and Electronic Sackbut, to the late EMS Synthi AKS and Moog Synthesizers, electronic music and mu…
Project Research

DefeXtiles: 3D printing quasi-woven textiles via underextrusion

OverviewDefeXtiles are thin, flexible textiles of many materials that can quickly be printed into a variety of 3D forms using an inexpensiv…
Project Research

Aguahoja II

Aguahoja II builds upon the platform technology of its predecessor, enabling large-scale multi-material 3D printing with abundant, organic …
Project Research

Aguahoja III

Aguahoja III expands the capabilities of a broad library of sustainable, organic 3D materials with generative patterns that countervail str…
Article Research

The Three Questions: In Conversation with Neri Oxman

Neri Oxman talks about the Nature x Humanity exhibit at SFMOMA, which features current and past research from the Mediated Matter group
Archived
Project Research

Breathing Garment: A respiratory regulation garment for voice pedagogy

Using OmniFiber technology, we fabricated a type of undergarment that singers can wear to monitor and play back the movement of respiratory…
Archived
Article Research

A fabric that “hears” your heart's sounds

Inspired by the human ear, a new acoustic fabric converts audible sounds into electrical signals.
Archived
Project Research

Glass II

Optically transparent and structurally sound, glass has played a significant role in the evolution of product and architectural design acro…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Glass I

Ancient yet modern, enclosing yet invisible, glass was first created in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt 4,500 years ago. Precise recipes for…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Wanderers

The Wanderers were unveiled as part of the exhibition: ‘The Sixth Element: Exploring the Natural Beauty of 3D Printing' on display a…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Vespers III

Vespers is a collection of masks exploring what it means to design (with) life. From the relic of the death mask to a contemporary living d…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Totems

Biodiversity on planet Earth is under momentous threat, with extinction rates estimated between 100 and 1,000 times their pre-human level. …
Archived
Article Research

MIT spinoff, OPT, ramps up production of its 3D-printed nasal swab

Spinoff OPT Industries is scaling up production of novel metamaterials, such as swabs for Covid-19 testing.
Article Research

Industry Talk | Tapis Magique: a choreomusical interactive carpet

Pressure-sensitive, knitted electronic textile carpet generates 3D sensor data based on body gestures, drives an immersive sonic environment
Article Research

Robotic Textiles in Action: OmniFiber

AZoM talks to Ozgun Kilic Afsar, a visiting doctoral student in the Tangible Media group, about her work on the OmniFiber project.
Project Research

OmniFiber: Strain-tunable Fluidic Fiber Actuators for Soft Robotic Textiles and Autonomous Garments

OmniFiber is a reconfigurable fiber technology for movement-based interactions based on thin fluidic fiber actuators with closed-loop strai…
Article Research

New fibers can make breath-regulating garments

Robotic textiles could help performers and athletes train their breathing, and potentially help patients recovering from postsurgery changes
Project Research

Venous Materials: Towards interactive, fluidic mechanisms

By Hila Mor, Yu Tianyu, Ken Nakagaki, Benjamin Harvey Miller, Yichen Jia, Hiroshi IshiiThe Venous Materials project envisions a new way to …
Project Research

A Scalable Networked Smart Sensate Skin

We have developed tightly coupled sensor network that tries to mimic some of the sensory characteristics of a natural skin. Developed in a …
Archived
Publication Research

Electronic Textile Gaia: Ubiquitous Computational Substrates Across Geometric Scales

Wicaksono, I.*, Cherston, J.*, & Paradiso, J. A. (2021). Electronic Textile Gaia: Ubiquitous Computational Substrates Across Geometric Scales. IEEE Pervasive Computing.
Project Research

Aguahoja

Programmable Water-Based Biocomposites for Digital Design and Fabrication across ScalesAguahoja is an exploration of nature’s design space.…
Archived
Project Research

Silk Pavilion II

What are radically sustainable methods for knitting, making and building in the age of the Anthropocene? How can humankind and members of o…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Maiden Flight

Maiden Flight is an autonomous biological laboratory environment designed for studying the impact of space flight on the sole reproductive …
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Vespers II

Novel technologies for additive manufacturing are enabling design and production at nature’s scale. We can seamlessly vary the physical pro…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Silk Pavilion

The Silk Pavilion explores the relationship between digital and biological fabrication on product and architectural scales.The primary st…
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Archived
Project Research

Living Mushtari

How can we design relationships between the most primitive and the most sophisticated life forms? Can we design wearables embedded with s…
Archived
Project Research

Beast

Beast is an organic-like entity created synthetically by the incorporation of physical parameters into digital form-generation protocols. A…
Archived
Project Research

Monocoque

French for "single shell," Monocoque stands for a construction technique that supports structural load using an object's external skin. Con…
Archived
Project Research

Raycounting

Raycounting is a method for generating customized light-shading constructions by registering the intensity and orientation of light rays wi…
Archived
Project Research

A tailored, electronic textile conformable suit for large-scale spatiotemporal physiological sensing in vivo

The rapid advancement of electronic devices and fabrication technologies has further promoted the field of wearables and smart textiles. Ho…
Project Research

3D Printed Nasopharyngeal (NP) Swabs by OPT Industries, Inc. in response to the 2020 COVID-19 Crisis

Dr. Jifei Ou, who received his PhD and graduated from the Tangible Media group in 2019, started a company called OPT Industries, Inc.,…
Project Research

Material Functionalization

When materials sciences meet HCI and e-textiles, for custom sensors and actuatorsIn this project we explore the process of polymerization t…
Project Research

MASKproject: Open standard respirator, N95 alternative face mask

Designed for mass manufacture and rapid deployment, we are building an open hardware, reusable, sterilizable, modular, and filter-media agn…
Article Research

3 Questions: Using fabric to “listen” to space dust

Fabric samples are headed to the ISS for resiliency testing; possible applications include cosmic dust detectors or spacesuit smart skins.
Project Research

Doze: On-skin Scent Diffusion and Drug Delivery Patch

Doze is an IoT enabled platform for personalized scent diffusion and on-skin drug delivery. Leveraging a hydrogel technology, the Doze syst…
Article Research

Leveraging a 3D printer “defect” to create a new quasi-textile

Tulle-like DefeXtiles can be 3D printed with no custom software or hardware.
Post Research

Andrea Ling's "Design by Decay, Decay by Design" receives STARTS Grand Prize at Ars Electronica '20

Andrea Ling, an alum of the Mediated Matter group, has won the Grand Prize in Artistic Exploration at this year's festival.
Article Research

Canadian architect wins €20,000 STARTS prize

Canadian architect and installation artist Andrea Ling has received the 2020 STARTS Grand Prize in the category of Artistic Exploration.
Publication Research

Doze: Hydrogel-Based Epidermal Platform for Personalized Scent Diffusion

Chee, G*., Cobb, T.*, Richter-Lunn, K.*, Wicaksono, I.*, and Freedman, B.R., 2020. Doze: Hydrogel-Based Epidermal Platform for Personalized Scent Diffusion. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers.
Article Research

Neri Oxman’s “Material Ecology” | Bio Art and Design

The exhibition has now become a part of the MoMA's ‘Virtual Views’ program due to the pandemic.
Project Research

Attentive Electronic Skins For Low Power, Multifunctional Operation

​We imagine equipping electronic skins with a sense of attention in order to operate more efficiently in resource constrained environments.…
Project Research

Space Webs as Infrastructure for distributed sensor networks and other infrastructure on low gravity bodies

We study textiles and nets as a base form for growing infrastructure and allowing reconfigurable sensing on low gravity bodies (for instanc…
Post Research

Reusable, N95 alternative face mask developed by a collaborative team hits production

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the need for PPE, a diverse team came together to produce the "Open Standard Respirator, Model 1"
Archived
Project Research

Living Materials Library

The control of living systems as part of design interfaces is of interest to both the scientific and design communities due to the ability …
Archived
Archived
Project Research

WraPr: Spool-Based Fabrication for Object Creation and Modification

In this work, we propose a novel fabrication method for 3D objects based on the principle of spooling. By wrapping off-the-shelf materials …
Archived
Publication Research

Venous Materials : Towards Interactive Fluidic Mechanisms

Mor, Hila, Ken Nakagaki, et al. "Venous Materials : Towards Interactive Fluidic Mechanisms." CHI '20, Honolulu, HI, USA, April 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376129
Publication Research

Prototyping Interactive Fluidic Mechanisms

Hila Mor, Ken Nakagaki, Yu Tianyu, Benjamin Harvey Miller, Yichen Jia, and Hiroshi Ishii. 2020. Prototyping Interactive Fluidic Mechanisms. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 881–884. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3374920.3374967
Article Research

WraPr is a spool-based system for creating and modifying 3D objects

Known as “WraPr,” the system presents a novel fabrication method for creating new or augmenting existing 3D objects with soft materials.
Article Research

WraPr, a spool-based 3D fabricator

I thought I’d seen plenty of fab stuff done with filaments, but obviously I hadn’t seen it all. That’s pretty groovy.
Article Research

This crazy sculpture is made by an MIT-engineered machine that 3D prints biopolymers to replace plastic

Aguahoja—a winner of Fast Company’s 2020 World Changing Ideas Awards—rethinks the paradigm of recycling.
Article Research

MIT professor Neri Oxman is as otherworldly as her creations

"We, as architects of the built environment, are entering an era where we’re designing for survival.”
Article Research

Neri Oxman grows tools for the future at new MoMA retrospective

“My team and I stand in the crossroads, challenging some of the processes that designers face at the intersection of biology and technology"
Article Research

The most futuristic building in New York—currently on view at MoMA—wasn’t made by humans

To build a new pavilion in midtown Manhattan, the architect Neri Oxman employed 17,000 silkworms.
Publication Research

Towards inverse design of biomimetic nanostructures exhibiting composite structural coloration

Bianca Datta, Sundeep Jolly, and V. Michael Bove, Jr., “Towards inverse design of biomimetic nanostructures exhibiting composite structural coloration,” Proc. SPIE Advanced Fabrication Technologies for Micro/Nano Optics and Photonics XI, 10930, 2019.