Designing for, with, and by nature

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

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

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…

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

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

In concert with the Mediated Matter group's HLM additive manufacturing research, the emergent field of Hybrid Living Fibers (HLF) or "…

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

Hybrid Living Materials (HLMs) are formed by combining living and non-living materials such that the resulting composites take on the funct…

A major concern for manned missions is space radiation. Ionizing radiation is known to pose both acute and chronic risks to many organisms,…

How might zero gravity space affect silk spinning, and what benefits might such material properties provide for digital fabrication and add…

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

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

FIBERBOTS is a digital fabrication platform fusing cooperative robotic manufacturing with abilities to generate highly sophisticated materi…

We present a multimaterial voxel-printing method enabling the physical visualization of data sets commonly associated with scientific imagi…

This research presents water-based robotic fabrication as a design approach and enabling technology for additive manufacturing (AM) of biod…

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

The Digital Construction Environment is the first architectural-scale structure fabricated with the Digital Construction Platform (DCP). U…

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

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

Rottlace is a family of masks designed for Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk. Inspired by Björk’s most recent album—Vulnicura—the Mediated …

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

The Synthetic Apiary proposes a new kind of environment, bridging urban and organismic scales by exploring one of the most important organi…

A large portion of the chemical and biological processes underlying our everyday experience remains imperceptible to us. Be it the contents…

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

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

The Digital Construction Platform (DCP) is an in-progress research project consisting of a compound robotic arm system. The system comprise…

Gemini—an acoustical “twin chaise"—spans multiple scales of the human existence extending from the warmth of the womb to the stretches of…

Prosthetic sockets belong to a family of orthoic devices designed for amputee rehabilitation and performance augmentation. Although such pr…

The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel involved a deliberate plan hatched by mankind to construct a platform from which man could fight G…

A collaboration between Professor Christine Ortiz (project lead), Professor Mary C. Boyce, Katia Zolotovsky, and Swati Varshaney (MIT). Ope…

How can biological organisms be incorporated into product, fashion, and architectural design to enable the generation of multi-functional, …

The SpiderBot is a suspended robotic gantry system that provides an easily deployable platform from which to print large structures. The bo…

A 3D-printed dress was debuted during Paris Fashion Week Spring 2013 as part of collaboration with fashion designer Iris Van Herpen for her…

The digitally reconfigurable surface is a pin matrix apparatus for directly creating rigid 3D surfaces from a computer-aided design (CAD) i…

Generating 3D Lichtenberg structures in sintered media (i.e. glass) using electricity offers a new approach to digital fabrication. By robo…