Matt Gorbet
Biography
Matt Gorbet is a Canadian interdisciplinary technologist, researcher and artist working on physically interactive technology. He holds a Bachelor of Science in architecture from MIT and a Master of Science from the MIT Media Lab, and is pursuing a Doctorate of Design at Florida International University's College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts, where his research concerns control strategies for interactive objects and environments.[1]
Before founding his own practice he was a researcher at PARC (formerly Xerox PARC) in Palo Alto, where his team designed and studied new document genres made possible by emerging technologies. He holds several patents on interaction technologies, and collaborates with the Living Architecture Systems Group, the research network around Philip Beesley's responsive-architecture work.
Gorbet Design
Gorbet Design Inc., which he founded with Susan Gorbet, produces large-scale interactive installations for restaurants, retail spaces, airports, museums, hotels and architectural environments. The practice's characteristic approach treats a building surface or public space as a slow, responsive medium rather than a display — closer to weather than to signage.
Triangles
While at the MIT Media Lab, Gorbet worked with Maggie Orth and Hiroshi Ishii on Triangles, a tangible interface presented at CHI 1998: a set of identical flat plastic triangles with magnetic edge connectors that recognise which pieces are joined to which, allowing physical assembly of the pieces to drive digital narrative and manipulation.[2] Triangles is a frequently cited early demonstration of tangible user interfaces and of the idea that topology, not just position, can be an input.
Key Themes
- Tangible and ambient interaction. Gorbet's work belongs to the lineage running from Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown's calm technology through Ishii's Tangible Media Group: interfaces that occupy the periphery of attention and that are manipulated with the hands rather than through symbols.
- Interaction at architectural scale. Much of the practice's output treats a room, a façade or a concourse as the interface, which changes the design problem from usability to legibility — how a person entering a space discovers that it responds at all.
- Control strategies for responsive environments. His doctoral research addresses the design question that follows: once an environment reacts, what should govern the reaction so that it reads as alive rather than as broken.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Gorbet works squarely in the territory that calm technology describes — technology that informs without demanding attention — and his installations are among the more sustained practical experiments in what it feels like to inhabit a space that is quietly aware of its occupants.
