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2nd UxD Talk with Lining Yao (CMU): “Making Active Materials Green: Morphing Matter for Sustainability”

Lining Yao, Assistant Professor of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Morphing Matter Lab hosted on May 20th the second Webinar of the series “User Experience Design Talks @CMU Portugal”.

The introduction to the session and presentation of the UxD Advanced Training Program expected to be launched in a near future was led by Nuno Nunes, National Director of the CMU Portugal Program and a senior researcher in the area of Human Computer Interaction. Diogo Cabral,  Interactive Technologies Institute, Instituto Superior Técnico, welcomed the participants and introduced Professor Lining Yao, who in addition to her role as CMU Professor leads the Morphing Matter Lab, a lab focused on developing materials, tools, and applications of adaptive, dynamic and intelligent morphing matter from nano to macro scales. Lining and her lab work anti-disciplinarily, publishing and exhibiting across science, engineering, design and art. Lining 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.

Under this talk Lining Yao spoke about her and efforts to build, or rebuild, a harmonious relationship between technology and environment, humankind and nature. She started by approaching different morphing mechanisms in natural seeds and microorganisms, and ended with an ecological vision of the future empowered by morphing materials. According to Yao, Nature has engineered many morphing materials for the sake of survival, and it is important to learn from nature, how biodegradable morphing mechanisms are developed to save our planet’s energy consumption and carbon emissions.

The third and last talk of this series of Webinars will take place on June 1st, 3 pm (Lisbon)/ 10 am (Pittsburgh) , by Gierad Laput Research and Engineering Manager at Apple, entitled “Context-Driven Implicit Interactions”.More at the event page

Registration is free but mandatory: online form. All participants will receive the login credentials the day before the event.

These Sessions will take place between April and June under the Advanced Training Programs in User Experience Design of the CMU Portugal Program, which is planned to start in 2021.

More about the previous Talk:

Session 1: John Zimmerman (CMU HCI Institute) “Designing Systems that Blend Human and Machine Intelligence”