A Sandbox Life

The sandbox was my entire home when I was a child. I constructed sandcastles, rescued princesses and developed worlds. It didn’t matter what I was doing as long as I was creative. I imagined new creatures, magic and quests to go on. Sand was the first material experience I had where I could shape my environment. Life is a sandbox game. You make a character, explore, level up and forge your own path.

To me, design is the manipulation of grains of sand: you amalgamate experiences to evoke emotion. Our tools were limited in the past, but, as emerging technologies develop, we’re increasingly enabled. Hardware interfaces have shapeable memory, stimulate more senses simultaneously, and can distinguish between “that is” and “that is like”.

I envision revolutionary human capabilities centuries from now. People who are enabled to grab matter around them like sand in a pail and manipulate its structure to make their sandcastles. Whether they are phase shifting and programming materials or symbiont with microorganisms, they can bring their sandcastles to life. I want to build better hardware interfaces than our standard, with materials as the foundation for broadening technology experience and its interface design.

Materials of choice are so critical to society that they are used as a title to the period of time they shaped — the use of fire, stone, and metals encouraged and created societal behaviors as they altered common perceptions of limitations. As tools of designers at the time, they permitted the progression of our social values and thinking. Now, nanotechnology has brought around a breadth of new abstractions for what materials can include.

My grandfather used an abacus, but today I touch a glass screen connected to trillions of transistors. The time taken to “program” detailed atoms has become exponentially shorter. In ancient civillization, we were limited in design scope and relied on bacteria in the soil to be our nanomanufacturing facilities, precursors to nanofabrication. Now, glass walled buildings are filled with the precocious who pioneer new solid-state devices, much like the large rooms computers used to fill up. Each step forward enables more complex control of the physical and digital environments.

Every day, we inch closer to the end of the silicon age. Silicon was the foundation of the electrical revolution in storing information in the matter around us. Materials have always held my attention because they chart societal progression and thinking. My previous research let me explore the frontier of digital logic with vanguard materials, and my background in physics has always tilted towards solid-state and condensed matter physics. I continue to use them as a muse for interface design, and I link the digital and physical to make media tangible.

A bucket and spade empowered me in my sandbox; my mission is to develop technologies that facilitate the autonomy to treat life just like I do.