Lining Yao, Transforming Materiality: Orchestrating between the Born and the Made. Technology, one might claim, is designed to recapitulate biology: as we strive to design physical objects and architecture that are adaptive, responsive and ever evolving, we find ourselves immersed in Nature’s way. Yet, after years of practice in transforming materiality for adaptive physical interfaces, we realize that it is the combination of the two worldviews — both natural and engineering approaches — that generates a method including their best facets: adaptation with speed, transformation with accuracy, growth with control and response with augmented purposes. This talk begins with reflections on natural materials, on their adaptive and transformable behaviors across scales, from single biomolecules to entire natural organisms. Three research projects will be described, each representing different levels of integration between natural and engineering approaches in order to achieve interfaces with a dynamic output of physical materiality.

Lining Yao is a Chinese born designer and maker of novel materials and interfaces. Yao is currently a PhD Candidate at Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab, where she focuses on pushing Human Computer Interaction toward Human Material Interaction. Her research revolves around the intersection of novel materials, digital fabrication and interaction design. Rather than computing the virtual data, she is trying to compute the physical material. Programming the physical states of material’s shape, color, stiffness, texture and density is the long term goal of her research. Before coming to the US, she had been deeply involved in Chinese local design and manufacturing industry as a design consultant and entrepreneur. She has won numerous industrial design awards including Red Dot Award and iF Design Award. BS, MFA, Art and Design, Zhejiang University, China. MS, Media Arts and Science, MIT.