Interactions - January/February 2012

wait decades before atom hackers (material scientists, self-organizing nano-robot engineers, etc.) can invent the enabling technologies for Radical Atoms, we believe the exploration of interaction design techniques can begin today.

Acknowledgements The vision of Radical Atoms has been developed through a series of design workshops since 2008. More than two dozen past and current members of the Tangible Media Group and colleagues in the MIT Media Lab have contributed to shape the concept and articulate the interaction techniques and possible applications. We would like to thank all listed here for their contributions: Amanda Parkes, Hayes Raffle, James Patten, Gian Pangaro, Dan Maynes Aminzade, Vincent Leclerc, Cati Vaucelle, Phil Frei, Victor Su, Scott Brave, Andrew Dahley, Rich Fletcher, Jamie Zigelbaum, Marcelo Coelho, Peter Schmitt, Adam Kumpf, Keywon Chung, Daniel Leithinger, Jinha Lee, Sean Follmer, Xiao Xiao, Samuel Luescher, Austin S. Lee, Anthony DeVincenzi, Lining Yao, Paula Aguilera, Jonathan Williams, and the students who took the Fall 2010 Tangible Interfaces course. We thank the TTT (Things That Think) and DL (Digital Life) consortia of the MIT Media Lab for their support of this ongoing project. Thanks are also due to Neal Stephenson, whose science fiction novels and talks inspired us, and Ainissa Ramirez of Yale University, who advised us about the state of the art of material science.

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11. Pangaro, G., Maynes-aminzade, D., and Ishii, H. The actuated workbench: Computer-controlled actuation in tabletop tangible interfaces. Proc. of the 15th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ‘02). aCM, new york, 2002, 181-190.

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About thE Authors
Hiroshi Ishii is the Jerome b.
Wiesner Professor of Media arts
and Sciences at the MI T Media
Lab. Ishii’s research focuses upon
the design of seamless interfaces
between humans, digital informa-
tion, and the physical environment. His team seeks
to change the “painted bits” of GUIs to “tangible
bits” by giving physical form to digital information.

Dávid Lakatos is a graduate stu-
dent in the Tangible Media Group
at the MI T Media Lab. His
research focuses on interaction
design with future dynamic mate-
rials, at the intersection of
mechanical engineering, material
design, and philosophy.

Leonardo bonanni completed his
Ph.D. and postdoctoral work with
the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible
Media Group, where he taught
sustainable design and devel-
oped interfaces for exploring the
lives of objects. He is founder and
Jean-baptiste Labrune is a
researcher at the MI T Media Lab
specializing in human-machine
creativity. He is also lab director
at bell Labs in their application
domain, where he leads research
projects involving interdisciplinary
teams from the human sciences, design, and tech-
nology.