Udayan UmapathiAlumni

Udayan Umapathi
Udayan is a designer, engineer and an experimental physicist from Bangalore, India. His current work focusses on making macro-sclale physical materials compute. He investigates how macro-scale computation in materials can lead to meaningful human experiences. Broadly his research is at the intersection of human-computer interaction, computation, physics and materials, with the ultimate goal of enhancing human thinking, creativity, learning and well-being.
Previously his work looked at digital fabrication tools as a platform to create these mediums and investigated how to turn these tools themselves into mediums for expression.
Before Media Lab, Udayan founded a silicon valley company that focusses on making low-tech tools for digital fabrication. He has also worked at other research labs such as The HCI Lab at Hasso-Plattner Institute, Germany and Pivot Lab at Purdue University, United States. His work has been showcased at international venues such as ACM UIST, ACM CHI and exhibited at various art galleries.
If Udayan is not making something at a lab, he is playing with nature, flying planes or rolling on his robotic skateboards.

Projects

Papers

Programmable Droplets for InteractionCHI 2018 2018
Scaling Electrowetting with Printed Circuit Boards for Large Area Droplet ManipulationMRS Advances 2018
AnimaStage: Hands-on Animated Craft on Pin-based Shape DisplaysDIS 2017 2017
Printflatables: Printing Human-scale, Functional and Dynamic Inflatable ObjectsCHI 2017