Since 2013, MIT researchers go to Asia every year to scale their work, and explore manufacturing ecosystems to work towards local production, anywhere.
This residency also hopes to help scaling art and research at unprecedented dimensions and unexplored territories, as well as benefiting communities in developing countries as it can improve affordability to hardware.
New: the residency welcomes applications from any institutions (examples) but only MIT participants can be funded for now.
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⚡ TL;DR:
- What: residency about hacking manufacturing to amplify art and research impact
- How: by visiting and working with factories (about electronics, textiles, etc), electronic markets, makerspaces, art spaces, local universities, etc.
- Who: with our partners from academia + industry (2025: AIRS + SUSTech and Seeed + MuRata)
- When: 4 weeks during January 2026
- Where: Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Bangkok and Osaka.
Questions? research_at_scale@mit.edu
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Residency Details
1) Topics:
• Past examples: open hardware, from electronics to textiles (see archives below)
• Hopes for the Jan 2026 cohort:
- 50% about open design for good (from the engineering perspective)
- 50% about arts & tech (an exhibition will be possible at UABB: the Hongkong-Shenzhen Biennale)
• Examples: (multiple proposal ideas are OK)
- massive kinetic art installations!?
- participative musical instruments for crowds!?
- making a (scientific) tool affordable!?
- biodegradable electronics manufacturing!?
- sensor networks for environment monitoring!?
- electronic miniaturization for imperceptible wearables!?
- provocative and weird ideas are also very welcome!
- etc.
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2) Requirements:
• Commitment: 4-week presence in January (it's really short actually)
• Expectations for all residents:
- Open source work only
- Documentation by the end of the residency (example)
- Demo/exhibition (or Poster) at the symposium (non archival) and UABB for the best art proposals.
• Expectations for funded MIT students (flights and hotel are covered):
- Multiple talks: public work presentations at the beginning, and reports at the end.
- Our partners will hope to see open prototypes at the end of IAP (example), but full completion / publication can be later (example).
• Distributed organization: residents will be invited to help the organization with visits of factories and arts spaces, but also for the ScalableHCI symposium (as hackathon chair, workshop chair, web chair, social media chair, etc):
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🚀 Accelerated introduction:
• The residency starts with a symposium (Jan 5-11, 2026) that condenses the main aspects of the residency: ScalableHCI.com (fee = voluntary donations / free for students)
• There are various ways to get funding for the trip, example: gsc.mit.edu/about/funds (or similar options in other universities)
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