Inspired by the hair structures occur in nature at different scales with multiple functionalities, Cilllia looks at new ways of 3D printing dense hair on flat and curved surfaces. It allows users to design and generate hair geometry at 50 micrometer resolution and assign various functionalities to the hair, such as mechanical adhesion property; new passive actuation and touch sensing on a 3D printed artifact. The project envisions a future where physical materials’ properties and functions, whether eletrical or mechanical can be encoded in the material fabrication process directly by users.

Jifei Ou (欧冀飞) is a designer, researcher and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, where he focuses on designing and fabricating transformable materials across scales (from μm to m). Physical materials are usually considered as static, passive, and permanent. Jifei is interested in finding ways to redesign physical materials with the characteristics of digital information, such as the ability to change shape and and to be programmable. Such new materials could be used to construct a responsive living environment, accelerate the process of design and manufacturing, and enhance our existing interaction with products. As much as his work is informed by digital technology, he is inspired in equal measure by the natural world around him. He has been leading projects that study bio-mimicry and bio-derived materials to design shape-changing packaging, garments and furniture. An adventurer at heart, Jifei was born and raised in southwest China and has brought his design practice and scientific research to Asia, Europe and the U.S. His works have been published in academic conferences such as User Interface Software and Technology (UIST, 2013 & 2016), Tangible Embodied and Embedded Interaction (TEI, 2014 & 2016) and Computer-Human Interaction (CHI, 2015 & 2016); interviewed and featured in publications such as Forbes, Discovery and Science Friday; awarded by design competitions such as A’ Design Award (2016), IXDA award (2016), CORE77 design award (2015), iF design award (2015), etc. He has been organizing workshops on shape-shifting materials with researchers, high school students and artists around the world. He is also deeply involved in the manufacturing community in Shenzhen in order to facilitate the real world application of his research. Jifei holds an MS from the MIT Media Lab and a Diplom in Design from the Offenbach University of Art and Design in Germany.

The Tangible Media Group at MIT Media Lab explores the Tangible Bits & Radical Atoms visions to seamlessly couple the dual world of bits and atoms by giving dynamic physical form to digital information and computation. To address this challenge, we presented our new vision, “Radical Atoms”, in 2012. Radical Atoms takes 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. Radical Atoms is a computationally transformable and reconfigurable material that is bidirectionally coupled with an underlying digital model (bits) so that dynamic changes of physical form can be reflected in digital states in real time, and vice versa. Radical Atoms is the future material that can transform their shape, conform to constraints, and inform the users of their affordances. Radical Atoms is a vision for the future of human-material interaction, in which all digital information has a physical manifestation so that we can interact directly with it. We no longer think of designing the interface, but rather of the interface itself as material. We may call it “Material User Interface (MUI).”