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Hiroshi Ishii
Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Media Arts & Sciences, MIT; co-director, MIT Media Lab
Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Media Arts & Sciences, MIT; co-director, MIT Media Lab
Where the sea meets the land, life has blossomed into unique forms. At another seashore between the land of atoms and the sea of bits, we now face the challenge of reconciling our dual citizenships in the physical and digital worlds. Our vision of Tangible Bits seeks to realize seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment by giving physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible. This is a vision driven by concepts rather than function, because today's technologies will become obsolete in one year and today's applications will be replaced in ten, but a true vision, Ishii believes, can last longer than 100 years. Our goal is to invent new design media for artistic expression as well as scientific analysis, taking advantage of the richness of human senses developed through interaction with the physical world, as well as computational reflection enabled by real-time sensing and digital feedback. Tangible Bits projects have been exhibited at venues including the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), Ars Electronica, the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Venice Biennale, and ACM CHI and SIGGRAPH.
Hiroshi Ishii is a tenured Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, named Associate Director in May 2008; he founded and directs the Tangible Media Group and co-directs the Things That Think (TTT) Consortium, pursuing the vision of 'Tangible Bits' — changing the 'painted bits' of GUIs to physically manipulable 'tangible bits.' His team's work has been presented at ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, AIGA, Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou, and Victoria and Albert Museum. A display of many of the group's projects took place at the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo in summer 2000, and a three-year-long exhibition, 'Get in Touch,' featured the Tangible Media Group's work at Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria) from September 2001 through August 2004. He was elected to the CHI Academy by ACM SIGCHI (announced 2006). Prior to MIT, from 1988-1994, he led a CSCW research group at NTT Human Interface Laboratories, inventing TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard. In 1993 and 1994, he was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Canada. He received his B.E. in electronic engineering, M.E. and Ph.D. in computer engineering from Hokkaido University, Japan (1978, 1980, 1992).
