Lining Yao is a Chinese born designer and maker of novel materials and interfaces.

Yao is currently a PhD Candidate at Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab, where she focuses on pushing Human-Computer Interaction toward Human Material Interaction.

Her research revolves around the intersection of novel materials, digital fabrication, and interaction design. Rather than computing the virtual data, she is trying to compute the physical material. Programming the physical states of material’s shape, color, stiffness, texture, and density is the long-term goal of her research.

Before coming to the US, she had been deeply involved in Chinese local design and manufacturing industry as a design consultant and entrepreneur.

She has won numerous industrial design awards including Red Dot Award and iF Design Award.

Chinese Heritage, Designers, Design, Influential Women,