DUB is our grassroots, cross-campus alliance of students, faculty, and industry partners interested in HCI & Design at the University of Washington. DUB Community Day is an annual event aimed at bringing us together to reflect on our community, welcome newcomers, share fresh ideas, and socialize. Talks will be broadcast on Zoom, but networking will be in-person only.
Additional agenda information will be provided here as it develops.
The retreat is being organized on the DUB mailing list, including information on how to RSVP and participate.
Our agenda:
Hiroshi Ishii is the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. He was named Media Lab Associate Director in May 2008. He is the director of the Tangible Media Group which he founded in 1995 to pursue new visions in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): “Tangible Bits” and “Radical Atoms.” Ishii and his team have presented their research at a variety of scientific, design, and artistic venues (including ACM SIGCHI, SIGGRAPH, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Milan Design Week, Cannes Lions Festival, Aspen Ideas Festival, Industrial Design Society of America, AIGA, Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou, Victoria and Albert Museum and NTT ICC) emphasizing that the development of a vision requires the rigors of both scientific and artistic review. In 2006 Ishii was elected to the CHI Academy by ACM SIGCHI, received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award in 2019, and was named ACM Fellow in 2022. Prior to joining the MIT Media Lab, from 1988-1994, Ishii led the CSCW research group at NTT Human Interface Laboratories Japan, where he and his team invented TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard.
Envision, Embody, and Inspire: Shaping a Mountain Range of Evolving Visions
In this talk, I will trace the evolution of our vision-driven design research from Tangible Bits to Radical Atoms and from Telepresence to TeleAbsence over the past 30 years. Through a series of interaction design projects showcased across media arts, design, and scientific communities, I will illustrate how we blend artistic exploration with scientific rigor. Central to this approach is my guiding philosophy: “Be Artistic and Analytic. Be Poetic and Pragmatic.”
While mainstream Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research often focuses on functional concerns—such as user needs, practical applications, and usability—our work seeks to transcend these boundaries. Bringing together art, design, science, and technology, we aim to make the digital tangible while exploring the deeper meaning of the ‘presence of absence.’
As a culmination, I will present our latest speculative design, TeleAbsence, where the audience will experience illusory communication with a deceased pianist brought to life through the keys of a piano.