Marcelo Coelho

Lecturer

Marcelo Coelho is a Lecturer in the Department of Architecture where he teaches graduate and undergraduate design studios and directs the Design Intelligence Lab. Spanning a wide range of media, processes, and scales, his work seeks to create new forms of expression and collaboration between human and machine intelligence.

Marcelo’s work has been exhibited internationally, including places such as the Rio 2016 Paralympic Ceremonies, Times Square, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Ars Electronica, and can be found in museums, private collections, and billions of products sold all over the world. Recognition for this work includes two Prix Ars Electronica awards, Design Miami/ Designer of the Future Award, Red Dot Design Award, and Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Award.

Marcelo holds a doctorate degree from the MIT Media Lab and teaches courses that bring together industrial design, user experience, and artificial intelligence.

Projects

Large Language Objects

Interactive projector that augments shadow puppetry with AI generated storytelling

Large Language Objects (LLO) are a series of objects and physical interfaces for language models that extend the capabilities of artificial intelligence into the physical world. By combining models such as ChatGPT, DALL·E, and custom trained discriminators, they reveal a host of new applications for artificial intelligence, from new ways of experiencing music or creating and telling stories, to new forms of playing and communicating.

Developed as part of MIT’s 4.043/4.044 Interaction Intelligence course, these Large Language Objects also provide a glimpse at a new kind of creative process that leverages the capabilities of generative AI from the early stages of concept development to coding, fabrication, and deployment.

Light Craft

Film scene with AI-driven on-set lighting

Light Craft is a research project to investigate how deep learning and new hardware technologies can be combined to make film lighting easier to learn, create, and communicate. By creating predictive and on-set lighting assistants, we are making film lighting more accessible, flattening pre- and post-production processes, and using artificial intelligence to put humans at the center of the creative process.

NNN

A visual programming language for networks of neural networks

NNN is a dataflow and visual programming environment that leverages the power of artificial intelligence for creative applications. Using a node-based graphical user interface, NNN abstracts away some of the complexities of machine learning and allows users to train and create ‘networks of neural networks’, scaffolding simpler models into increasingly complex behaviors and interactions. By creating interfaces that leverage what humans and machines do best, we can create more powerful, generalizable and accessible tools.

Beyond Vision

Beyond Vision is a lighting performance created for the Rio 2016 Paralympics Opening Ceremony. As a poetic representation of the sense of sight, a mass cast of 400 dancers were equipped with illuminated walking sticks collectively forming a large-scale 2.5-dimensional display.

Sticks were outfitted with a row of 128 programmable, high-intensity LEDs, which were triggered by a radio transmitter to play a series of pre-scripted animations and visual effects while dancers defined the position and orientation of each light.

Six-Forty by Four-Eighty

Six-Forty by Four-Eighty is a large-scale lighting installation that breaks pixels away from the screen, physically immersing viewers into an interactive computing experience.

Individually, pixels can be rearranged in space and change their color in response to touch; however, they only communicate their state to each other by using a person's body as the conduit for information. When grouped together, the pixels create patterns and animations, becoming a medium for composition and expression which evokes a form of digital graffiti.

Sandcastles

Sandcastles is a series of photographs that explore material representation across architectural and nano-scales, by traversing pre and post-photography technologies.

In collaboration with visual artist Vik Muniz, we drew a series of castle drawings onto a grain of sand with the use of a focused ion beam and scanning electron microscope. The final images are exhibited as large scale prints.

Publications

Computational-Skins-Marcelo-Coelho.pdf

Marcelo Coelho and Tovi Grossman

Crowd-Driven Pattern Formation: Computational Strategies for Large-Scale Design and Assembly

Architectural Design Journal - Wiley

2017

Crowd-Driven-Pattern-Formation-Marcelo-Coelho.pdf

Marcelo Coelho et al.