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Units: Units: G (Fall) 3-3-6 H-LEVEL Grad Credit
WHEN: Tuesday 1-4 pm
WHERE: E15-341 Nagashima Room
MAS.834 THE FIRST CLASS: September 9th (Tue), 2025
MAS.834 THE LAST CLASS: December 9th (Tue), 2025
INSTRUCTOR: Prof. Hiroshi Ishii <ishii@mit.edu> Hiroshi Ishii's CV
CO-INSTRUCTOR: Prof. Min Fan <mfan1028@media.mit.edu>
GUEST LECTURERS
Yudai Tanaka (Ph.D. candidate, University of Chicago). 09/23
Prof. Min Fan (Visiting Professor) 10/07
Dr. Jean-Baptiste Labrune <jb@media.mit.edu> 10/28
Dr. Xiao Xiao <xiao.xiao@devinci.fr> 10/28
Dr. Jie Li <jieli8@mit.edu> 11/04
Anna Borou Yu <annayu@mit.edu> 11/18
Prof. Behnaz Farahi <behnaz_f@media.mit.edu> 12/02
Prof. Kelin Carolyn Zhang <kzhang07@risd.edu> 12/02
TAs:
Lucy Li <lucy_li@media.mit.edu>
Quincy Kuang <quincyku@media.mit.edu>
Hye Jun Youn <hyoun95@media.mit.edu> (advisor)
Cyrus Clarke <cyrusc@media.mit.edu>
Chuanqi Sun <stack@mit.edu>
Yuhan Wang <yuhan_wang@gsd.harvard.edu>
Isabela Naty Sanchez Taipe <belast@mit.edu>
David Hojah <davidhoj@mit.edu>
Keyi Zhang <keyizhang@gsd.harvard.edu>
Admin: Lusine Ghazaryan <lusin77@media.mit.edu>
CONTACT: mas834_2025_staff@media.mit.edu (instructor, TAs, and staff)
▶︎ PRE-REGISTRATION / CROSS-Registration: If you are interested in taking this course, please pre-register for MAS.834 by September 2nd (Tue), 2025, so that your name will show up on the MIT CANVAS site. Your accessibility to the MIT CANVAS as a pre-registered student is the condition for the MAS.834 enrollment. If you need help pre-registering, please get in touch with the Registrar’s Office at MIT or the Registrar’s Office at your institution.
▶︎ SIGN-UP: If you are taking this course, please complete and submit this Google Form by noon on Tuesday, September 2nd (Tue), 2025.
If you have questions about the contents of the MAS.834 course, please send an email to mas834_2025_staff@media.mit.edu.
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We develop technologies that advance a digital future for humanity. Yet, inspiration from historical interfaces has never been more essential. Embodied interaction with physical artifacts continues to enrich design, communication, and learning. Although much of our world has dissolved into pixels on computer screens, a persistent yearning for multimodal, physical, and tactile design experiences remains. With the emergence of generative AI, we now have the opportunity to reimagine how we engage with computational information—moving beyond the boundaries of traditional Graphical User Interfaces.
Students are encouraged to design more thoughtfully by reflecting on the historical foundations and personal relationships embedded in designed objects. We aim to help them explore how the affordances of historical artifacts can be leveraged to inspire new experiences powered by contemporary AI technologies. For their projects, students should consider how the use and interaction of a historical object might be augmented, transformed, or reimagined through integration with generative AI.
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This HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) course will explore the design space of Tangible User Interfaces (Tangible Bits & Radical Atoms) that give dynamic physical form to digital information and computation. Our goal is to broaden the bandwidth of interaction between people and digital information, making bits directly manipulable with our hands and perceptible at the periphery of human awareness. Through the invention of new digital/generative/physical materials, we hope to enhance our capabilities to express, communicate, and design using the full range of human senses and skills. We will pursue tangible interactions that are both aesthetically pleasing and inspiring, as well as practical.
Among various applications to support human activities, we have been researching Tangible Telepresence to strengthen connectedness among people separated spatially and temporally (e.g., inTOUCH, inFORM). We introduce "tangibility" to interpersonal communication and collaboration channels to enhance the sense of co-presence (social presence).
We also explore the new vision of TeleAbsence, extending the notion of Telepresence to the past of life and the afterlife. We conduct a speculative design of illusory communication to recall the memories of loved ones, favorite places, and events you wish to remember and not forget. In this context, we focus on old tangible objects such as antique telephones, acoustic musical instruments, typewriters, and historic scientific instruments. We employ AI and AR techniques to explore interactive storytelling and access the memory associated with the tangible legacies.
MAS.834 will run the “Yesterday's Tomorrow Design Studio,” which provides a novel framework for the intergenerational exploration of technological heritage and material culture guided by our TeleAbsence vision. In the studio, students will examine ancestral artifacts from the pre-digital era to re-imagine new experiences substantiated by the mindful use of AI. The program aims to cultivate sensitivity to the experiential qualities of tangible interfaces while inspiring thoughtful dialogue across generations to rethink the relationship between cultural heritage and design.
MAS.834 is a project-based interaction design course centered around design workshops, the literature on Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs), dynamic shape displays, programmable materials, generative AI, and telepresence. This course has two primary student group projects to design TUIs for “Yesterday's Tomorrow,” as well as various guest lecturers from relevant fields of HCI, arts, interaction design, AI, and enabling technologies.
Students will design and develop experimental TUIs, novel applications, engaging interaction scenarios, and enabling technologies in the design studio environment, using sketches, animation, simulation, physical mockups, video, and working prototypes to solicit studio discussion. Course enrollment is limited to around 30~35 to keep a design studio atmosphere.
This course is 100% in-person (physical) meetings on the MIT Campus (E15-341) as a default. We will extensively utilize cloud-based digital tools, including Canvas, Miro, Google Drive/Docs/Slides/Sheets, Dropbox, and other remote collaboration groupware. We use Zoom for class recording and guest speakers.
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Week 1: Course Orientation: HCI and Tangible UI
Week 2: “Yesterday’s Tomorrow Design Studio”
Week 3: (Speculative) Design Workshop
Week 4: HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) Tangible UI, Ambient UI, Spatial UI, Material UI.
Week 5: HHI (Human-Human Interaction): CSCW & TelePresence/TeleAbsence
Week 6: RoboTangible and Radical Atoms
Week 7: User Study Design
Week 8: Project 1 mid-term review
Week 9: Morphing Materials & Fabrications
Week 10: Learning for Children, Art and Heritage
Week 11: Human-AI Interaction, Vision-driven Research
Week 12: Project 2 final review & Group Photo Shooting
* No class on October 14 (10/13 Holiday), October 21 (ML member meeting), and November 11 (Veterans Day)
Hiroshi Ishii's ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award Lecture on May 6th, 2019, in Glasgow
In 1997, we presented our vision of “Tangible Bits” at the CHI ’97 conference. We proposed the concept of Tangible User Interface (TUI) that is based on the physical embodiment of digital information and computation, to go beyond the current dominant paradigm of “Painted Bits” or Graphical User Interface (GUI). Humans have evolved a heightened ability to sense and manipulate the physical world, yet the GUI based on intangible pixels takes little advantage of this capacity. The TUI builds upon our dexterity by embodying digital information in physical space. TUIs expand the affordances of physical objects, surfaces, and spaces so they can support direct engagement with the digital world.
Through the design of a variety of TUIs, however, we have learned that TUIs are limited by the rigidity of “atoms” in comparison with the fluidity of “bits.” TUIs have limited ability to change the form or properties of physical objects in real time. This constraint can make the physical state of TUIs inconsistent with the underlying digital models.
To address this challenge, we presented our new vision, “Radical Atoms,” in 2012. Radical Atoms takes a leap beyond Tangible Bits by assuming a hypothetical generation of materials that can change form and appearance dynamically, becoming as reconfigurable as pixels on a screen.
Radical Atoms is a computationally transformable and reconfigurable material that is bidirectionally coupled with an underlying digital model (bits) so that dynamic changes of physical form can be reflected in digital states in real time, and vice versa.
Radical Atoms is the future material that can transform their shape, conform to constraints, and inform the users of their affordances. Radical Atoms is a vision for the future of human-material interaction, in which all digital information has a physical manifestation so that we can interact directly with it. We no longer think of designing the interface, but rather of the interface itself as material. We may call it “Material User Interface (MUI).”
Our vision of TeleAbsence extends the concept of telepresence to the past and the afterlife to address the vast emotional and temporal distance caused by the memory of loved ones who drifted apart and faded away. Instead of explicit and literal representations of loved ones, TeleAbsence describes poetic encounters with digital and physical traces left by the absence of others. TeleAbsence fosters illusory communications to conjure the feeling of being there with those no longer with us without using synthetic or generative representations and utterances. Our vision is deeply inspired by the Portuguese concept “Saudade”—the “desire for the beloved thing, people, place, and moment, made painful by its absence.” We present our vision through five design principles: presence of absence, illusory communication, the materiality of memory, traces of reflection, and remote time, grounded in historical and cultural contexts. We present exploratory narratives to illustrate these principles and the concept of ambient co-presence using poetry, phone, piano, and pen as mediums.
https://direct.mit.edu/pvar/article/doi/10.1162/PRES_a_00441/125855/TeleAbsence-A-Vision-of-Past-and-Afterlife
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/158451
https://www.facebook.com/ishii.mit/posts/pfbid0oZ4Y94XeoNUL5po416PMr8THXjBc1LoiZkQD4fVLrRRgJvaRTRs84cgWo5rNWo7cl?from_xma_click=xma_web_url&xma_click_id=B3A20B95-DF08-4D94-A031-2C41239EFBD8&tam_xma_content_type=2000&is_fb_content=true&forward=false&ts=1754023585437
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