It is always very quiet inside the eye of the storm.

Neri Oxman

Architect and designer Neri Oxman designs for, by, and with nature. Oxman and her team seek to do away with the “world of parts” approach to manufacturing, where products and buildings are designed as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions. In Oxman’s approach, coined Material Ecology, computation, fabrication, environment, and the materials themselves are inseparable. Oxman earned a PhD in design computation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after studying architecture at the Architectural Association in London and the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology; she also studied medicine at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Nowadays, Neri Oxman is the Sony Corporation Career Development Professor and Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where she founded and directs the Mediated Matter research group. Her team conducts research at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, materials science and synthetic biology, and applies that knowledge to design across disciplines, media and scales—from the micro scale to the building scale. Oxman’s goal is to augment the relationship between built, natural, and biological environments by employing design principles inspired and engineered by Nature, and implementing them in the invention of novel design technologies. Areas of application include architectural design, product design, fashion design, as well as the design of new technologies for digital fabrication and construction.

Further FunThinking

Neri Oxman TED 2005 : Design at the intersection of technology and biology