Paola Antonelli

Paola Antonelli, an alumna of the architectural school at the Politecnico University of Milan, joined The Museum of Modern Art in 1994 and is currently Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design. Before her move to MoMA, Antonelli was a contributing editor for Domus (1987-91) editor of Abitare (1992-94) and has contributed to Harvard Design Magazine, Paper, and Nest as well as to the BBC series Building Sights and the NPR series Studio 360. Antonelli has also taught architecture and design theory at UCLA and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She was the recipient of the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt Design Mind award and in 2007, TIME named her one of the 25 most incisive design visionaries. Her latest exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind on the relationship between design and science is currently on view at MoMA. She is also working on Design Bites, a book on foods from all over the world appreciated as great examples of design, to be published in 2008.

Ben Aranda / Chris Lasch

Aranda/Lasch is a New York-based architectural studio using craft and computation to make discoveries in the realm of structure and space. Recent winners of the Young Architects Award in New York, their work is also subject of the book, Tooling, published by Princeton Architectural Press. Their firm’s alter ego, terraswarm, produces short films and video installations. Together Aranda/Lasch & terraswarm have exhibited their work internationally with galleries and institutions dealing with design and architecture. In 2008 they are included in a design exhibition at the MoMA and will mount a solo show at the Johnson Trading Gallery in New York. They are currently working with artist Matthew Ritchie and arts organization T-BA21 on a large, three-dimensional drawing of the universe.
www.arandalasch.com

Jessica Banks

Jessica Banks recently left the 24th grade at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab just shy of her Ph.D. in robotics. She is now an R&D OpenLab fellow at Eyebeam, a non-profit art and technology center and media art gallery in New York City. Her work at Eyebeam focuses on designing and building reactive and robotic furniture, lighting and spaces. Through the formation of a collective company based on these objects, Jessica intends to establish a novel business model that encourages and also profits from the exchange of technical and creative intellectual property in the public domain.  In light of all this asymptotic loftiness, Jessica currently relishes the sense of completion afforded by a flattened tube of toothpaste.

Ayah Bdeir

Ayah Bdeir is a media artist, engineer and designer who graduated from the MIT Media Lab with a Masters of Media Arts and Sciences after studying Computer & Communication Engineering and Sociology in Beirut. She is now a fellow at Eyebeam, a center for art and technology in New York. Her two primary interests are experimenting with active living spaces, objects and clothes, as well as creating technologies that play with the representation and perception of the Middle East and its identity(ies).

Adam Bly

Adam Bly is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Seed and the CEO of Seed Media Group. At the age of 16, he became the youngest researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, where he spent three years studying cell adhesion and cancer. With a mission to raise global science literacy, Adam set out from the lab to launch a new type of magazine that captured the ideas, issues and icons shaping science culture. In 2006, the Independent Press Awards noted that "the best comparison for Seed is the early years of Rolling Stone, when music was less a subject than a lens for viewing culture." Under Adam's leadership, the magazine received two National Magazine Award nominations in 2007, for Best Design and for General Excellence, the magazine industry's highest honor. Seed is now the flagship division of Seed Media Group, a science media company he founded in 2005 to extend the magazine's mission to other platforms and markets.

Adam is the recipient of numerous international prizes. In 2007, he was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a recipient of the Golden Jubilee Medal from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and his achievements have been highlighted by former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, "for showing people the scope and power of science not just as an object of study but as a key to understanding the world around us." He has spoken around the world on the relationship between science and society in the 21st century, most notably at the World Economic Forum (Davos), STS Forum (Kyoto), DLD (Munich), OECD-MOST Conference (Beijing), ideaCity (Toronto), the National Academies of Science (Washington, DC), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and he has lectured at Harvard Graduate School of Design, MIT, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, McGill University, and Peking University. He lives in New York.

Laurene Boym

Laurene Leon Boym is a native of New York City. From the time she was a teenager, she has been a part of the creative subculture in the city, notably as an outstanding participant in the East Village gallery group shows. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts, NYC (BFA – Studio Art, 1984) and subsequently attended Pratt Institute (MID – Industrial Design, 1993) on a full academic scholarship. Her thesis project at Pratt was the subject of the groundbreaking exhibition, Mechanical Brides at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in NYC, where she assumed the position of Designer in Residence.

In 1992, she founded The Association of Women Industrial Designers and helmed the organization until 1997. She has lectured at many schools, including the Parsons School of Design and more recently as part of the School of Visual Arts’ prestigious MFA design program in New York.

From 1993–95, she collaborated with high profile design consultancies Carbone Smolan and Smart Design, where she was a designer for the OXO kitchen tool line. In 1995, she teamed up with Constantin Boym at Boym Partners Inc. and began designing watches for Swatch under the art direction of Alessandro Mendini, conceiving of storage ideas for the German plastics company Authentics, and started a long collaboration with the office furniture company Vitra. Over the years, Boym Partners have worked with many companies including Acme, Domestic, Flos, Gaia + Gino, Gourmet Settings, Hermes, McDonalds, Moooi, and Swarovski.

In 1998, Boym Partners organized Souvenirs for the End of the Century, a collection of design objects for the Millennium. It gained notoriety for its Buildings of Disaster, which in turn became the top grossing independent design project of all time.

Boym Partners are represented as designer artists by Moss, NYC. Exhibitions and installations have included: “Design and The Elastic Mind” at MoMA, NYC (2008); “Heavy Metal” at Moss Gallery, Art Basel/Design Miami (2007); “Das Souvenir”, at Frankfurt Museum of the Applied Arts (2007); Double Take, MoMA, NYC (2007) and the “100 Year Waltz” at Moss Gallery, NYC (2006). Their work is in numerous international museum collections. They have been recipients and finalists for many design awards, notably The National Design Award in Product Design (2005).

Their work was a subject of two museum retrospectives: Oh Boym! in 2003, and America in 2006. Curious Boym, a 220-page book dedicated to the work of the Boym Partners was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2002. In 2005, a catalog of the America retrospective was published by Birkhauser.

Chandler Burr

Chandler Burr is The New York Times' perfume critic. His new book, The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris & New York (January 2008, Henry Holt) tells two parallel stories; the first about a year Burr spent for The New Yorker magazine in Paris behind the scenes at Hermès watching legendary perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena create the Hermès scent "Un Jardin sur le Nil" and the second about a year (beginning with an article for The New York Times) inside Coty with Sarah Jessica Parker as she directed the making of her perfume "Lovely."

Burr is also author of the books The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses (2003, Random House) and A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation (1996, Hyperion), based on his Atlantic cover story, “Homosexuality and Biology.”

He speaks around the world on scent and perfume, and hosts interactive masterclasses in gourmand scents. The series of classes explain perfume to the lay person and show fragrance's structure and artistry using food-based scent raw materials (absolutes of cinnamon, clove, pepper) and gourmand perfumes like "Angel" (which uses the scent of cotton candy) and "Shalimar" (the scent of vanilla), all of which are reflected in a 7-course gourmet meal.

Beginning his journalism career as a stringer at the Christian Science Monitor’s Southeast Asia bureau in Manila, Burr then earned a Masters in International Economics & Japan studies from the Paul H. Nitze School/Johns Hopkins. He has also studied international relations at l'Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris and Chinese history at Min Zu Xue Yuen (Central Institute of Foreign Nationalities) in Beijing.

Burr has written on business for Fast Company and Fortune, politics for the New York Times Magazine, and religion and science for US News & World Report, where he was a Contributing Editor. He has written on travel and food for Gourmet, Food & Wine, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, and Departures. His first stage play, Exquisite, was nominated in 1992 for the Helen Hayes award for Outstanding New Play, and his novel-in-progress You Or Someone Like You was excerpted in www.narrativemagazine.com.

Mr. Burr is represented by Eric Simonoff of Janklow & Nesbit, New York. His screen work is represented by Brian Siberell of Creative Artists Agency, and his speaking engagements by Scott Feldman of Two Twelve Management & Marketing (Scott.Feldman@Two12.com). Burr speaks French, Japanese, Italian, and enough Portuguese to negotiate the purchase of a coconut water on Copacabana beach. He is, foremost, a New Yorker. He is single.

Erik Demaine

Erik Demaine is Associate Professor and the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Professor in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Demaine's research interests lie in algorithms, from data structures for improving web searches to the geometry of understanding how proteins fold to the computational difficulty of playing games. He received a MacArthur Fellowship (2003) as a "computational geometer tackling and solving difficult problems related to folding and bending – moving readily between the theoretical and the playful, with a keen eye to revealing the former in the latter." He recently published a book about folding, together with Joseph O'Rourke, called Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra(Cambridge University Press, 2007). He has also coedited Tribute to a Mathemagician (A K Peters, 2003) in honor of the influential mathemagician Martin Gardner. His interests also span the connections between mathematics and art, particularly sculpture and performance, including the curved origami sculptures displayed at the MoMA exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind.

Drew Endy

Drew Endy earned degrees in civil, environmental, and biochemical engineering at Lehigh and Dartmouth. He studied genetics & microbiology as a postdoc at UT Austin and UW Madison. From 1998 through 2001, he helped to start the Molecular Sciences Institute, an independent not-for-profit biological research lab in Berkeley, CA. In 2002, he started a group as a fellow in the Department of Biology and the Biological Engineering Division at MIT; he joined the MIT faculty in 2004. Drew co-founded the MIT Synthetic Biology working group and the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, and organized the First International Conference on Synthetic Biology. With colleagues, he taught the 2003 and 2004 MIT Synthetic Biology labs that led to the organization of iGEM, the international Genetically Engineered Machine competiton; teams of students at ~30 schools from around the world competed in iGEM 2006. In 2004 Endy co-founded Codon Devices, Inc., a venture-funded startup that is working to develop next-generation DNA synthesis technology. In 2005 Endy co-founded the BioBricks Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that is working to develop legal and economic strategies needed to support open biotechnology. Drew's research interests include the engineering of integrated biological systems, as well as error detection and correction in reproducing machines.

Marc Fornes

Marc Fornes, Architect DPLG, is the founder of THEVERYMANY a design studio and collaborative research forum engaging the field of architecture via encoded and explicit processes.

In 2004 he graduated with a Master of Architecture and Urbanism from the Design Research Lab of the Architectural Association in London after having previously studied in France and Sweden.

Marc's work experience in France, La Reunion and UK includes ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS, where he was the project architect, from competition to tender documentation, for an experimental Mediatheque in Pau. During his three years on this project he directed the material research and geometrical development for the largest self-supported carbon fibre shell to date.

Marc has led workshops and appeared as a guest critic at the Architectural Association, The Royal College of Art, Pratt Institute, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. He continues developing his research and blog in New York City.
www.theverymany.net

Hugh Herr

Hugh Herr is Associate Professor within MIT's Program of Media Arts and Sciences, and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. His primary research objective is to apply principles of biomechanics and neural control to guide the designs of wearable robotic systems for human rehabilitation and physical augmentation. In the area of human augmentation, Professor Herr has employed cross-bridge models of skeletal muscle for the design and optimization of a new class of human-powered mechanisms that amplify endurance for cyclic anaerobic activities. He has also built elastic shoes that increase metabolic economy for running and leg exoskeletons for walking and load-carrying augmentation. In the area of assistive technology, Professor Herr’s group has developed powered orthotic and prosthetic mechanisms for use as assistive interventions in the treatment of leg disabilities caused by amputation, stroke, cerebral palsy, and multiple sclerosis.

Chuck Hoberman

Nowhere do the disciplines of art, architecture and engineering fuse as seamlessly as in the work of inventor Chuck Hoberman, internationally known for his Transformable Structures.

Through his products, patents and structures, Hoberman demonstrates how objects can be foldable, retractable or shape-shifting. Such capabilities lead to functional benefits: portability, instantaneous opening and intelligent responsiveness within the built environment.

Hoberman's designs have been applied as medical instruments, emergency shelters and portable furniture. He is well-known to children around the world through his award-winning toys.

Examples of his commissioned work include the Hoberman Arch in Salt Lake City, Utah, installed as the centerpiece for the Winter Olympic Games (2002). Other noteworthy commissions include a retractable dome for the Worlds Fair in Hanover, Germany (2000), the Expanding Hypar (1997) at the California Museum of Science and Industry, and the Expanding Sphere (1992) at the Liberty Science Center, Jersey City, and the Expanding Geodesic Dome (1997) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

His work has been exhibited several times at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Currently at MoMA is his commissioned installation, “Emergent Surface”, which is part of the exhibit, “Design and the Elastic Mind”.

Hoberman is the founder of Hoberman Associates, a multidisciplinary practice with clients ranging across sectors including consumer products, deployable shelters and space structures. The firm is engaged in a series of architectural projects to create the next generation of adaptive buildings, collaborating with architects such as Foster+Partners, Kohn Pedersen Fox, SHoP, Nikken Sekkai and others. These projects are developing retractable facades, responsive shading and ventilation, operable roofs and canopies.

Jamer Hunt

Jamer Hunt recently joined Parsons The New School for Design to direct the development of new interdisciplinary graduate design programs. Previously, he served for seven years as Director of the Graduate Program in Industrial Design at The University of the Arts. In his teaching and his professional work he focuses on design as a means for energizing the public realm. His practice, Big+Tall Design, is a full-service conceptual design laboratory. He is co-founder of DesignPhiladelphia, an initiative to unite Philadelphia's design community and was a Juror for the Concepts category in I.D. Magazine's Annual Design Review in 2006. Jamer has served on the Board of Directors of the American Center for Design, on the editorial board of the forthcoming Journal of Contemporary Design and Culture, and co-chaired the 2002 AICAD national conference, Hearsay: 10 Conversations on Design. He holds a doctorate in cultural anthropology and has consulted or worked at Smart Design, frogdesign, WRT, Seventh Generation, and Virtual Beauty. Jamer's work has been presented at numerous international and national industrial and graphic design conferences. His written work engages with the poetics and politics of the built environment and has been published in books, journals, and magazines, including the publication of his "Manifesto for Postindustrial Design" in I.D. magazine.

Natalie Jeremijenko

Natalie Jeremijenko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at New York University and affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and Environmental Studies. A new media artist who works at the intersection of contemporary art, science, and engineering, her work takes the form of large-scale public art works, tangible media installations, single channel tapes, and critical writing. She investigates the theme of the transformative potential of new technologies – particularly information technologies. She has recently held positions of on the faculty of Engineering at Yale; in the Visual Arts Dept. at UCSD; and Distinguished Visiting Critic in the Department of Art, Virginia Commonwealth University. In recognition of her achievements, she has received awards and grants from agencies including the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences. Natalie's work has been exhibited and screened internationally at shows, including the recent Whitney Biennial. She is represented by postmasters Gallery and the Lavin speaking agency.
www.xdesign.ucsd.edu | www.onetrees.org | www.howstuffismade.org

Christophe Laudamiel

Christophe Laudamiel joined IFF in September 2000 and is a senior Perfumer concentrating on fine fragrance creations as well as on innovative applications. A native of France with a scientific background, he has a vision for the future that expands the role of fragrance in Art and Design.

Laudamiel graduated valedictorian with a master’s degree in chemistry from the European Chemistry Institute in Strasbourg, France in 1991. After teaching Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he received his Perfumer-Creator Degree from Procter & Gamble in 1997 and became a Senior Perfumer there.

From a young age, Laudamiel wanted to be a chef. His childhood was spent learning the tropical fruits, spices, plants and flowers that were native to the various places his family lived in France and New Caledonia. While doing an internship as a flavor chemist, his eyes were opened to the greater possibilities of perfumery and the many quality ingredients that go into a beautiful scent. Atmosphere and ambiance infuse his creations and this inspiration comes from many sources – a cool lounge, a music video, a new scientific discovery, a strong personality or a geographical location can all inspire the fragrance we will wear next year.

Laudamiel’s creations include:
Absinth – Slatkin & Co.
Agassi My Summer – Aramis
Amber Nude and Amber Absolute – Tom Ford
Fierce – Abercrombie & Fitch
Happy Heart and Happy in Bloom – Clinique
HN for Men and HN for Women – Harvey Nichols
Island (Fifi Award in Bath) and Fiji Island – Michael Kors
The Kiss of the Artist – Orlan
London – Burberry
Mimosa – Slatkin & Co.
the Perfumes of Perfume – Thierry Mugler for Patrick Süskind
Polo Blue For Men – Ralph Lauren (FiFi Award, Star Men’s Fragrance of the Year 2003)
Ruehls 7 – Ruehls
Theo Fennell – Theo Fennell
True Star Gold – Tommy Hilfiger
Amanda Lepore Doll – Integrated Toy
Black Candle (CEW Award) and Rocks (Fifi Award) – Elton John
Capri Candle – Jonathan Adler
Crème Brulée Candle – Laura Mercier
Pink Pony Candle – Ralph Lauren
Wedding Candle – Oscar de la Renta

In addition to the awards noted above, Laudamiel received First Prize and the Special CNRS Award at the National Chemistry Olympiads (Paris 1986), a Bronze Medal at the International Chemistry Olympiads (Helsinki, Finland 1988), the Special Recognition Award from Procter & Gamble (1999) and the Perfumers’ Choice Award in 2003. He gives perfumery lectures at the Royal College of Art in London and the University of the Arts in Berlin and has introduced Perfumery at the World Economic Forum. He is a member of the American, the French and the German Societies of Perfumers, the Osmothèque, the Leadership and Innovation board of the Fragrance Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the World Wildlife Fund, and French Birdlife.

With a strong background in science and a devotion to the arts, Laudamiel is committed to raising the awareness of fragrance and bringing it to people’s lives in new and creative ways. He is inventor on several patents for new molecules and for new fragrance diffusion techniques. Laudamiel sees fragrance “outside of the bottle” and is independently developing Perfumery as an art form, including strong collaboration with other fine artists and leaders.

Laudamiel lives in New York City’s West Village. He enjoys skiing, swimming, and the performing arts.

Janna Levin

Janna Levin is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her scientific research concerns the Early Universe, Chaos, and Black Holes. Her second book – a novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Knopf, 2006) – won the PEN/Bingham Fellowship for Writers that “honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work...represents distinguished literary achievement...” It was also a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award for "a distinguished book of first fiction.” She is the author of the popular science book, How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space.

She holds a BA in Physics and Astronomy from Barnard College of Columbia University with a concentration in Philosophy, and a PhD from MIT in Physics. She has worked at the Center for Particle Astrophysics (CfPA) at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to the UK where she worked at Cambridge University in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. Just before returning to New York, she was the first scientist-in-residence at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford with an award from the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and Arts (NESTA). She has written for many artists and appeared on several radio and television programs.
www.jannalevin.com

Greg Lynn

In 2001, TIME Magazine named Greg Lynn one of 100 of the most innovative people in the world for the 21st century. In 2005, Forbes Magazine named him one of the ten most influential living architects. Greg Lynn has been at the cutting edge of design in both architecture and design culture in general when it comes to the use of the computer. The buildings, projects, publications, teachings and writings associated with his office have been influential in the acceptance and use of advanced technology for design and fabrication. In addition to receiving professional awards from the AIA and Progressive Architecture, his Korean Presbyterian Church of New York was officially listed by the NYC Landmarks Commission as one of the thirty most important buildings built in the city in the last 30 years. It was also named by the National Building Museum in Washington as one of four civic buildings that “shaped the public realm” in America, along with the Getty Center, Milwaukee Art Museum and Walt Disney Concert Hall. He received the American Academy of Arts & Letters Architecture Award in 2003.

His architectural designs have been exhibited in both architecture and art museums including the 2000 Venice Biennale of Architecture where he represented the United States in the American Pavilion. His work is in the permanent collections of CCA, SFMoMA, and MoMA and has been exhibited at the Pompidou, Beyeler, Cooper-Hewitt, MAK, MoCA, NAI, Carnegie, ICA and Secession museums among others. In addition to his architectural work, he has industrial design objects in production. Both his Alessi “Supple” Mocha Cups and his Vitra “Ravioli” Chair have been inducted into the Museum of Modern Art’s Permanent Collection.

Henry Markram

Henry Markram followed a dual scientific and medical degree at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where he received distinctions for his discovery of the subjectivity of information processing by single neurons. He moved to Israel and obtained his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in the field of neuroscience discovering how neuromodulation in the brain governs the motivation behind what is learned and remembered at the synaptic level. He carried out his first post-doctoral research as a Fulbright Scholar at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and a second post-doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute, in Germany, as a Minerva Fellow. He discovered a watershed neural timing rule that governs the magnitude and direction of change in synaptic connections, which has become widely recognized as a core principle of neural information storage. He received a tenure track position at the Weizmann Institute for Science where he went on to discover the third core synaptic learning principle which governs the form of synaptic changes during learning – that which enables neurons to align their activities to form a coherent symphony. He also made a series of discoveries on the design principles of the neocortical microcircuitry which lies at the heart of mammalian intelligence. He received early tenure at the Weizmann and in 2002, he moved to the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology as Full Professor, founder and director of the Brain Mind Institute in Lausanne. Here he discovered the forth core principle of neural information storage by finding that the foundation for synaptic learning is a tabula rasa wiring between neurons that is shaped in a Darwinian-like manner during experiences. His fifteen year quest to reverse engineer the neocortical microcircuitry also yielded the core blue-prints of the circuitry which are required to be able to build a computer model of the brain. He launched the Blue Brain Project using powerful supercomputers from IBM and in three years, his team completed the first reconstruction of the neocortical column according to biological recipe. Markram is now taking the Blue Brain Project further towards a full-scale and biologically accurate computer model of a human brain within the next decade.

Henry has received numerous awards during his career and has published around 100 research papers. He is currently Co-Director of the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland and Director of the Blue Brain Project.

Neri Oxman

Neri Oxman is an architect and researcher currently based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she is a Presidential Fellow working towards her PhD in Design and Computation; She is associated with the Smart Cities Group at the Media Lab and the Design Lab. Neri Oxman studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, the Technion Israel Institute of Technology (Hons), and the Hebrew University Medical School. She has practiced Architecture with Ram Karmi, OCEAN NORTH and had served as a Design-Technology Research Consultant for Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (NY & London). Recent exhibitions of Neri’s work include the Venice Architectural Biennale [2002, 2004], and the Beijing Biennale [2004, 2006]. Her own work has been recently exhibited in the Emerging Talent Emerging Technologies Exhibition at the Beijing Biennial 2006, World Art Museum. Neri Oxman has taught design and computation workshops at the Emergent Technologies and Design Master's Program at the AA, the IT-Master's Programme at the Oslo School of Architecture, Rice and Columbia Universities. She has collaborated with Bentley Systems and the Smart Geometry Group and has given numerous workshops on Generative Components and other parametric software packages at various institutions including TU Delft, TU Vienna, Cambridge U.K, MIT, Columbia University, Harvard GSD, and KPF and Associates. Her work has been published in journals, magazines and books including AD (Emergence), AD (Techniques and Technologies in Morphogenetic Design), AD (Collective Intelligence in Design), Icon, AA Files, Building Design (BD Magazine), Demonstrating Digital Architecture (Birkhäuser Publishers), Archiprix International 2005 (010 Publishers), Morphoecologies (AA Publishers), MIT Plan, MIT Tech and MIT’s Thresholds. In 2005, she was the recipient of the FEIDAD Design Merit Award, an Archiprix Award, and the 2005-2007 America-Israel Cultural Foundation Award of Excellence. Her current work, Natural Artifice, is now showing in the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art, as well as scheduled to appear in the International Biennial of Contemporary Art to open in Seville during 2009. Neri has recently been recognized as a Revolutionary Mind 2008 by SEED Magazine, featuring her collection of work and research in Digital Design. Transcending disciplinary and professional boundaries, Oxman's work pioneers Material Computation as a design paradigm beyond typological expression. She promotes the aesthetics of material formation and behavior as a scientific contribution to ecological activism. Her current research attempts to establish both new forms of experimental design and novel processes of material practice at the interface of design, computer science, structural engineering, and biology. Neri is the founder of M A T E R I A L E C O L O G Y, an interdisciplinary design research initiative based in Cambridge, MA.

Fiona Raby

Fiona Raby is a partner in the design practice Dunne & Raby and part of the faculty within the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art, London. Dunne & Raby use products and services as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of emerging technologies. Many of the projects are collaborative: as the practice works with industrial research labs, academia and cultural institutions.

Projects include Placebo, a collection of electronic objects exploring mental well-being in relation to domestic electromagnetic fields (2001), Consuming Monsters: Big, Perfect, Infectious, which examines the role of design in the debate about the future of bio-technology and includes Evidence Doll which was commissioned by the Pompidou Centre, Paris in 2005. Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times celebrates humans as contradictory, complex and psychologically flawed. Their latest project, Do you want to replace the existing 'normal'?(2008) moves this thinking into the world of product design and Technological Dreams Series:no 1 Robot (commissioned by Z33, (2007)) takes another look at our relationship to computers and AI.

Their book, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects, was published by August/Birkhauser, 2001.

Matthew Ritchie

Acclaimed in the art world for his influential installations of painting, wall drawings, light boxes, sculpture, and projections, Matthew Ritchie’s investigations of the architecture, history and dynamics of culture are equally defined by their range and their lyrical visual language.

In 2001, Time magazine listed Ritchie as one of 100 innovators for the new millennium, for exploring “the unthinkable or the not-yet-thought.” His installations fuse unique narrative forms with our constantly changing factual understanding of our universe. His most recent exhibition in New York in 2006, "Universal Adversary", incorporated a major architectural intervention, a black latticework sky floating at the literal and conceptual center of the exhibition. Adventurous viewers could ascend into the sky and walk out to an oculus at the core of a suspended sphere where a projection of a parallel world, a vision of a possible future, unfolded its story.

His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide including the "Whitney Biennial, the Sao Paulo Bienal and the Sydney Biennial. Solo shows include the Dallas Museum of Art; the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Portikus, Frankfurt and The Fabric Workshop and Museum. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and numerous other institutions worldwide, including a permanent large-scale installation at MIT.

Recently Ritchie has been collaborating with physicists, architects, engineers, musicians and linguists to design a visual equivalent for the operating language of the universe. Matthew Ritchie was born in London in 1964; he lives and works in New York City.

Bradley Samuels

Bradley Samuels is one the five founding partners of Situ Studio. Concentrating on research, design and fabrication, the firm utilizes emerging technologies at the intersection of architecture and a variety of other disciplines. Situ Studio’s work has been enriched by close collaborations with geologists, writers, engineers, biologists, activists and artists. Recent projects include the design and fabrication of Solar Pavilion 2 in 2007, which was deployed in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Miami. The firm also collaborated on the design of the Flight 587 Memorial in Far Rockaway, Queens with artist Freddy Rodriguez. Situ Studio is currently working on a mapping project with the Brooklyn Public Library that is focusing on the visualization of demographic information for the institution’s branch planning and analysis. Situ Studio’s projects have been published in The New York Times, Architectural Record and journals such as LOG. The partners teach at Pratt Institute, Columbia University and give workshops and lectures around the world.

Kevin Slavin

Kevin Slavin is the Managing Director and co-founder of Area/Code. Founded in 2005, Area/Code creates cross-media games and entertainment for clients including Nokia, CBS, Disney Imagineering, MTV, Discovery Networks, A&E Networks, and like that.

Area/Code builds on the landscape of pervasive technologies and overlapping media to create new kinds of entertainment. They have built mobile games with invisible characters that move through real-world spaces, online games synchronized to live television broadcasts, and videogames in which virtual sharks are controlled by real-world sharks with GPS receivers stapled to their fins.

Slavin has spoken at MoMA, the Van Alen Institute, the Guardian, DLD, the Cooper Union, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and NBC, and together with Adam Greenfield he co-teaches "Urban Computing" at NYU/ITP. His work has been exhibited internationally, including the Design Museum of London and the Frankfurt Museum fuer Moderne Kunst.

Paul Steinhardt

Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Physics. He is on the faculty in the Department of Physics and in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences. He received his B.S. in Physics at Caltech in 1974; his M.A. in Physics in 1975 and Ph.D. in Physics in 1978 at Harvard University. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1978–81 and on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania from 1981–98, where he was Mary Amanda Wood Professor from 1989–98. He is a Fellow in the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2002, he received the P.A.M. Dirac Medal from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics.

Steinhardt is a theorist whose research spans problems in particle physics, astrophysics, cosmology and condensed matter physics. He is one of the architects of the "inflationary model" of the universe, an important modification of the standard big bang picture which explains the homogeneity and geometry of the universe and the origin of the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies and large-scale structure. He introduced the concepts of "quintessence,'' a dynamical form of dark energy that may account for the recently discovered cosmic acceleration. He has also explored novel models for dark matter. Recently, Steinhardt and Neil Turok (Cambridge U.) proposed the "cyclic model" of the early universe, a radical alternative to big bang/inflationary cosmology in which the evolution of the universe is periodic and the key events shaping the large scale structure of the universe occur before the big bang. In condensed matter physics, Steinhardt and Dov Levine (Technion) introduced the concept of quasicrystals, a new phase of solid matter with disallowed crystallographic symmetries, and Steinhardt has continued to make contributions to understanding their unique mathematical and physical properties. Recently, he has worked with Weining Man (Princeton) and Paul Chaikin (NYU) to develop a photonic quasicrystal for efficiently trapping and manipulating light in selected wavebands.

He has written over 200 papers, has edited 4 books, and has three U.S. patents, and two patents pending.

Lisa Strausfeld

Lisa Strausfeld’s design and technology education began at Brown University, where she studied art history and computer science. She received master’s degrees in architecture at Harvard University and in media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT she served as a research assistant in the Visible Language Workshop of the Media Lab, where she researched and developed new models for displaying and interacting with complex information.

In 1996, with two classmates from MIT, Lisa founded Perspecta, a software company that developed advanced search and visual user interface technology for the organization of large information collections. Perspecta was eventually sold to Excite@Home and Lisa’s information visualization work drew her to Quokka Sports, an online digital sports entertainment company. At Quokka she led the development of interfaces for “immersive sports experiences” that leveraged digital information assets from live sports events. Lisa’s work in her own studio, InformationArt, has ranged from creating interfaces for genomic visualization software to designing media projections for New York theater productions.

Lisa joined Pentagram as a partner in 2002. Her work lies at the intersection of physical and virtual space: where information structures and physical structures meet, and where navigation of information and navigation of buildings is joined in a single experience. Her team specializes in digital information design projects that range from software prototypes and websites to interpretive displays and large-scale media installations.

In addition to broad publication of her design work over the last ten years, Lisa holds two patents relating to user interfaces and intelligent information search and retrieval. In 2006, she was named to the Senior Scientist program at the Gallup Organization. She teaches interactive and site-specific design in the Graphic Design program at the Yale School of Art.

Skylar Tibbits

SJET was initiated by Skylar Tibbits as a catalogue and source of further inspiration for continual studies in experimental computation. SJET is a direct result of an endless search for more.

Skylar's work experience includes SKIII Space Variations, Zaha Hadid Architects and Asymptote Architecture.
www.sjet.us