Virj Kan 

Virj Kan is a designer, engineer, media artist, and entrepreneur. Her work investigates new paradigms for design, through transdisciplinary research and technology development. Whether it is in the domain of business, technology or art, her work centers on reshaping human relationships with the environment and each other. Currently she is based in Berkeley and Mendocino, California where she leads a public benefit company called Primitives Biodesign. Primitives produces functional, intelligent, and biodegradable materials to combat environmental issues in ocean conservation, plastics pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and food waste. In her academic research, she develops new mediums for design and information display that bridge the disparate communication systems between humans, machines, and nature.

Kan’s research interests encompass topics in biodesign, active & programmable matter, internet of things, wearable and physical computing. Her body of work spans from engineering stimuli-responsive biopolymers that sense the environment, to designing 3D robotic, IoT and mobile computing interfaces at the Samsung Design Innovation Center & NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. Her publications in the field of Human-Computer Interaction have received the Best Paper Award at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and Honorable Mention Award at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC). Kan is the recipient of numerous awards, including the SXSW Interactive Innovation Award, Golden Mouse Award at the ACM SIGCHI, Information is Beautiful Award, Green Award from the Greentech Festival, and Fast Company Innovation by Design. Her work has been featured in Ars Electronica, TED, Washington Post, Business Insider, Forbes, Dezeen, Vice, SXSW, Biocoder, Popular Mechanics, Design Boom, Gizmodo, Fast Company, CNN, MIT News, and Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She holds a Master of Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Bachelor of Science from Art Center College of Design.