The IdeaGarden allows participants of creative activities to collectively capture, select, and share (CCSS) the stories, sketches, and ideas they produce in physical and digital spaces. The iGarden attempts to optimize the CCSS loop and to bring it from hours to seconds in order to turn asynchronous collaborative thought processes into synchronous real-time cognitive flows. The iGarden system is composed of a tangible capturing system including recording devices always "at-hand", of a selection workflow that allows the group to reflect and reduce the complexity of captured data in real-time and of a sharing module that connects socially selected information to the cloud.

Meld provides a new perspective on your social life. By presenting your social graph as a moving picture, Meld breaks free from the text-centric interfaces of today's social networks, offering a fresh, holistic perspective. Unseen trends, before lost in mountains of text, can be better understood, providing an organic and evolving view of your relationships. Meld is a semi-finalist in the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

Today, marketplaces like Craigslist and eBay connect people who buy and sell goods and services without leveraging the power of mobility, localized posting, and community. With GPS- and Internet-enabled mobile devices in almost every pocket, we see a space for a new type of marketplace which takes into account your physical location, availability, and means of negotiation. What new and exciting interactions await for mobile marketplaces in the age of the app? How do you redesign the fundamentals of buying and selling goods or services with the people around you, by focusing on simplicity, trust, and discovery? With Peddl we explore this possibility by creating one of the first broadcast marketplaces.

Radical Atoms is our vision of interactions with future material.

Relief is an actuated tabletop display, able to render and animate 3D shapes with a malleable surface. It allows users to experience and form digital models such as geographical terrain in an intuitive manner. The tabletop surface is actuated by an array of motorized pins, which can be addressed individually and sense user input like pulling and pushing. Our current research focuses on utilizing freehand gestures for interacting with content on Relief.

SandScape is a tangible interface for designing and understanding landscapes through a variety of computational simulations using sand. The simulations are projected on the surface of a sand model representing the terrain; users can choose from a variety of different simulations highlighting height, slope, contours, shadows, drainage, or aspect of the landscape model, and alter its form by manipulating sand while seeing the resulting effects of computational analysis generated and projected on the surface of sand in real time. SandScape demonstrates an alternative form of computer interface (tangible user interface) that takes advantage of our natural abilities to understand and manipulate physical forms while still harnessing the power of computational simulation to help in our understanding of a model representation.

Sourcemap is a crowd-sourced directory of product supply chains and carbon footprints. The free and open-source website offers a suite of tools to visualize where products come from, to calculate their social and environmental impact, and to share this information across social media. Since 2009, the website has gathered thousands of user-generated sourcemaps of foods, furniture, clothing, electronics and more. The Sourcemap team partners with for- and non-profit organizations to bring visibility into their supply chains and to connect consumers with the source of products. Sourcemap has been featured by the BBC, NPR, the Globe and Mail and the Huffington Post and has received awards from Scientific American, Ars Electronica and ID magazine.

People have developed sophisticated skills for sensing and manipulating our physical environments, but traditional GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) do not employ most of them. Tangible Bits builds upon these skills by giving physical form to digital information, seamlessly coupling the worlds of bits and atoms. We are designing "tangible user interfaces" that employ physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments of digital information. These include foreground interactions with graspable objects and augmented surfaces, exploiting the human senses of touch and kinesthesia. We also explore background information displays that use "ambient media"—light, sound, airflow, and water movement—to communicate digitally mediated senses of activity and presence at the periphery of human awareness. We aim to change the "painted bits" of GUIs to "tangible bits," taking advantage of the richness of multimodal human senses and skills developed through our lifetimes of interaction with the physical world.

Long-distance families are increasingly staying connected with free video conferencing tools. However, the tools themselves are not designed to accommodate children's or families' needs. We explore how play can be a means for communication at a distance. Our Video Play prototypes are simple video-conferencing applications built with play in mind, creating opportunities for silliness and open-ended play between adults and young children. They include simple games, such as Find It, but also shared activities like book reading, where users' videos are displayed as characters in a story book.