Venous Materials project envisions a new way to design dynamic tangible interactions using fluidic Interfaces. It is a new type of interactive material that is inspired by veins systems in nature and the human body. When the user applies pressure or motion to the material, it dynamically displays geometric patterns and colors. The different patterns are displays that function as tangible sensors, that can animate dynamic graphics, create responsive objects for learning activities, and visualize body movement and balance.

Hila Mor is a designer, artist, researcher, and explorer born in Israel. She learns from history and from ancient wisdom, inspired by craft processes and examples from natural biological phenomena. She implements her insights through developing new technologies. Hila’s research is focused on the dynamic properties, form, and structure of materials. Her work process aims to enhance aesthetic opportunities in order to create novel human interaction experiences based on a thorough understanding and use of materials and technologies. Hila holds a B.Des. cum laude from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Prior to joining the Media Lab, Hila was a self-employed designer in Israel. Hila joined a post-bachelor research excellence program in the Bezalel Academy, called “The Incubator.” There, with the team, they established the technological research group, “Praxis.” Every day is a playground full of curiosities and discoveries. Outside of the lab, her favorite environment is being surrounded by plants and nature. When indoors, you can find her sketching ideas, being fascinated by simple yet complex forms like the inner structure of a zucchini, or trying to grow an avocado in an upside-down configuration.

The Tangible Media Group at MIT Media Lab explores the Tangible Bits & Radical Atoms visions to seamlessly couple the dual world of bits and atoms by giving dynamic physical form to digital information and computation. 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).”