Living Matter

The Living Matter Lab pursues a deeper understanding of alternative perspectives on temporality through a surprising medium: kombucha SCOBY.

Research from 12 members of the ATLAS community including faculty, alumni and students is featured at the 18th ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction.

ATLAS is well-represented at this year’s ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2023 conference convening at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh from July 10-14, 2023. This year’s theme is resilience . "Resilience is at once about flexibility, durability, and strength as well as a sense of mutuality and hope where solidaristic...

Biodesign researcher Fiona Bell says that anyone, anywhere can grow their own clothing right from their kitchens. You start by brewing a batch of kombucha.

We are happy to announce that 19 members of the ATLAS community contributed to work accepted for the 2023 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, taking place in Hamburg, Germany, April 23–28. Accepting fewer than 25 percent of submissions, CHI is the premier international conference on human-computer...

Researchers from ATLAS Institute's Unstable Design, THING, Living Matter and Superhuman Computing labs presented four papers, including three that received “Honorable Mention” awards, at the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '22).

Exploring biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction, authored by Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Netta Ofer, Shanel Wu, Mary Etta West, Mirela Alistar and Laura Devendorf introduced the DIS audience to biofoam, a water soluble and biodegradable material that can be made conductive.

ATLAS researchers will present six published works and two workshops at the 2022 ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), the world’s preeminent forum for the field of human-computer interaction. The conference, commonly referred to as “CHI,” will be held hybrid-onsite April 30-May 6, 2022 in New Orleans.

ATLAS PhD student Fiona Bell is passionate about sustainability; her doctoral dissertation tackles how to reduce waste through encouraging intimate relationships between designers, the materials they use and the artifacts they develop. In recognition of her work, Bell recently received financial support to help complete her thesis through a Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

SIGGRAPH sat down with Purnendu, a PhD student in the ATLAS Institute and a researcher at Meta Reality Labs, to talk about his team’s SIGGRAPH 2021 Labs project, “Electriflow: Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation Using Soft Electrohydraulic Actuators.” The team's actuator technology strives to augment animation within physical books.