Hiroshi Ishii , the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and associate director of the MIT Media Lab , recently received the 2026 Industrial Designers Society of America Special Achievement Award for "...pioneering work that has greatly influenced human-computer interaction and design."
For over 30 years, Ishii has explored how the digital and physical worlds can merge more meaningfully. Working with students, MIT colleagues, and international collaborators through his Tangible Media group , Ishii has pursued research marked by intellectual tension and artistic vision. He and his collaborators have produced truly original concepts including Tangible User Interfaces, which are interactive systems where physical objects, rather than screens, mice, or keyboards, are used to control and interact with digital information; and Tangible Bits , introduced at CHI '97 , which established how people engage with digital information through physical objects. His later concepts, Radical Atoms and TeleAbsence , inspire researchers and designers worldwide.
"Beyond his research, Ishii has made lasting contributions to the global design community through ACM CHI [the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems], TEI [conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction], and UIST [User Interface Software and Technology], and by mentoring generations of designers and researchers," said Professor Leila Ensaniat in her Industrial Designers Society of America Awards committee chair introduction.
Ishii's approach shows how bringing the arts, science, engineering, and design together creates innovations with real-world applications. His models now influence product development across industries, shaping how millions of people interact with information and each other.
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