Hiroshi Ishii (computer scientist)

Ishii was born in Tokyo and raised in Sapporo, Japan. He received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in electronic engineering (1978), and Master of Engineering (1980) and PhD (1992) in computer engineering, all from Hokkaido University in Sapporo.^[1]

Ishii worked at Japan's NTT Human Interface Laboratories in Yokosuka, where he made his mark in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in the early 1990s.^[2]

During his time at NTT, he co-authored two papers. In 1990 he and Kazuho Arita created the "TeamWorkStation." This device allowed users to record their desk and broadcast it to another user in a video conference, similar to a service like Zoom or Discord.^[3] His second project at NTT was the "ClearBoard", which was published in 1992. This piece of technology allowed to users to write on a see-through white-board like device that allowed them to maintain eye contact while collaborating.^[4]

In 1995, he joined the MIT Media Laboratory as a professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and founded the Tangible Media Group and started their ongoing Tangible Bits project.^[5]

In 1997, Ishii pioneered Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) in the field of human-computer interaction with the paper Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms,^[6] co-authored with his then PhD student Brygg Ullmer. In 2005, Ishii, Ullmer, and Robert J. K. Jacob published a token+constraint framework for tangible interfaces.^[7]

In 2012, he extended his vision of HCI to "Radical Atoms", a hypothetical future generation of materials which can change form and properties dynamically and computationally, becoming as reconfigurable in the physical 3D world as pixels on a 2D graphical user interface (GUI) screen.^[1] Ishii's inFORM display, released in 2013, is a tactile tabletop device for prototyping interfaces, with an appearance compared to a pin board.^[8] The TRANSFORM, a larger-scale shape-changing table, received the A'Design Platinum Award in 2015.^[9][10]

Ishii was elected to the CHI Academy in 2006. In 2019, he received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award.^[11] He was named to the 2022 class of ACM Fellows, "for contributions to tangible user interfaces and to human-computer interaction".^[12]

As of 2025^[update], he teaches the class MAS.834 Tangible Interfaces at the Media Lab.^[1]