CMU’s Lining Yao Will Feature at this Year’s CanUX

For this renowned CMU professor, the future is now.

 Morphing Matter as Both Intelligent Medium and Media
} Nov 3, 2019   10:40AM / 40 MINUTES

Morphing matter has unique behavior: it is fluidic and morphing, and it travels across the boundary of the physical and the digital. For people designing with its physical medium, morphing matter adds a flavor of programmability and responsiveness; for those designing with its digital medium, it adds tangibility and sensational experiences.

Morphing matter is transforming and mutating. It is an evoking design material as it adds spatial and temporal dimensionality. It reacts, adapts, and evolves; soon it will also grow, replicate, and age.

Morphing Matter is ecological. It recapitulates natural organisms, sourcing and reacting to environmental energy stimuli. It demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between the engineered and the grown. In this talk, Lining presents recent work conducted by Morphing Matter Lab from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, weaved through with threads about the behaviours and techniques of morphing matter.

 Speaker Bio: Lining Yao

Born in Mongolia, where she says her “only media input was from nature”, Lining Yao was inspired by the living world and how even the smallest and seemingly inconsequential lifeforms would adapt to external stimuli. Using microresolution printing, she modifies cells that can be woven into ‘biofabrics’, self-folding thermoplastic composites, bio-hybrid wearable devices or even edible 2D films that become 3D while cooking (yes, flat ship pasta actually exists). In an interview in Wired, she explained how she uses of this approach everywhere, with organic materials serving as a “technology that brings us back to nature, brings us back to the original form of life — a single cell [but] a cell that can incorporate input, computation, and output; the cell as a computer.”

She is an Assistant Professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, directing the Morphing Matter Lab. The lab develops materials, tools, and applications of adaptive, dynamic and intelligent morphing matter from nano to macro scales. Research often combines material science, computational fabrication and creative design practices. Lining and her lab work anti-disciplinarily, publishing and exhibiting across science, engineering, design and art.

She gained her PhD at MIT Media Lab, where she combined biological and engineering approaches to develop physical materials with dynamic and tunable properties including shape, color, stiffness, texture and density.

Before coming to the US, she had been deeply involved in her local design and manufacturing industry, both as a design consultant and entrepreneur. She has won numerous industrial design awards including Red Dot Award and iF Design Award. She also has a BS, MFA, Art and Design from Zhejiang University, China.

For more info, you can follow Lining on on Twitter @liningy

*Image credit: CMU Morphing Matter Lab