Jifei Ou | Role/Play: Collaborative Creativity and Creative Collaborations | NAS, 12 March 2018

Jifei Ou, another member of the Media Lab at MIT, is a compelling designer whose subject matter is transformable materials. Starting with the premise that physical materials are generally thought to be static and permanent, Jifei seeks to reformat such materials with digital characteristics, making them programmable, for instance, or able to change their shape. Bio-mimicry and bio-derived materials inform his research, and the natural world is just as informative to his thinking as digital technology. The new materials that result from these experiments could be used to serve a number of purposes, from the construction of responsive living environments to the enhancement of existing interactions with products.
Role/Play: Collaborative Creativity and Creative Collaborations at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC, brought together 54 graduate students from North America representing a wide range of disciplines to present their work to each other.
Organized by Liese Zahabi and Molly Morin.
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY