Role: Partners

Edo Van Breemen is a spatial sound composer and experience designer. He is a co-founder of Lobe Studio (lobestudio.ca) in Vancouver BC, the first 4DSOUND venue to be integrated with a multi-channel haptic floor. Edo’s involvement with the LASG involves composing for test-beds such as Meander, and research around the deployment of new hardware and software systems for publicly-oriented spatial sound events. Edo holds a BSc. in Environmental Science from UBC.

Luis Matias is an experimental artist, teacher, researcher and designer in polymorphic media from technology, science and arts. He has bachelor studies in architecture and urbanism at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Luis currently works on multidisciplinary projects that relate research, design, materialization and education processes focused on living architecture, film production, metaverse, NFTs & AI.
Founder Director of the HOLOMETABOLOUS polymorphous design project, which aims to develop a new design and creation methodology that integrates: AI, science, technology, 3D manufacturing, fashionism, cinema and photography in an environment of growing international collaboration.

Jenny Sabin is an architectural designer whose work investigates the intersections of architecture and science and applies insights and theories from biology and mathematics to the design of material structures. Sabin is the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture and director of graduate studies in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University where she established a new advanced research degree in matter design computation. Sabin is principal of Jenny Sabin Studio, an experimental architectural design studio based in Ithaca, and director of the Sabin Lab at Cornell AAP. She holds degrees in ceramics and interdisciplinary visual art from the University of Washington and a master of architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Her book LabStudio: Design Research Between Architecture and Biology, coauthored with Peter Lloyd Jones, was published in 2017. Sabin won MoMA and MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program in 2017 with her submission, Lumen.

Maria Cantalini-Williams is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at Wilfred Laurier University. She holds a Doctor of Education degree from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto in the Department of Applied Psychology. She has conducted large scale research projects in the areas of: innovation in education, collaborative inquiry, early childhood and work-integrated learning models. Throughout her career, Maria has assumed a teacher-researcher model, reflecting on pedagogy and educational practices resulting in numerous professional and academic publications. Most recently, she received the designation of Professor Emerita for her contributions to the Brantford campus of the Schulich School of Education at Nipissing University where she was the Director/Associate Dean of the Laurier-Nipissing Concurrent Education Program and taught in the Bachelor of Education and Graduate Studies programs. Maria also had the privilege to establish the international practicum program in Italy and was the faculty lead for 12 years. Since 2016, she has served as the Chair of a Rideau Hall Foundation Committee working on the Education for Innovation project, designed to develop innovation skills and mindsets in Canadian students.

Jane Bennett is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Her recent essays have appeared in Grain/Vapor/Ray (Odradek and the end of the world), Evental Aesthetics (Vital Materialism), MLN (mimesis), LA+:Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture, and Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung (walking). She is the author of Influx & Efflux: Writing up with Walt Whitman (2020); Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010); The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001); Thoreau’s Nature (1994), and Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment, (1987). She is currently working on notions of a creative cosmos, in Lucretius and Taoist philosophies.

Neil’s current works examine place, the imagery of architecture and historical events around personal and national identities with an emphasis on corporeality and materiality. Earlier works explored Neil’s interest in the structural presence of architecture, in which he has synthesized elements of the physical landscape whose fragments colonize architectural spaces. As a member of the collaborative OortCloudX, Neil works with associate John Roloff to find vestiges of modernist thought represented in architectural form, in which we problematize and portray in archeological narratives.

Ananda Gabo is an industrial designer currently based in Toronto, and has been making work around the themes of bio-fabrication since 2011. They are a co-founder of Culture² (pronounced “Culture Culture”), a journal for creative biology, ancestral knowledge, and community science.  In 2021, they also won 2nd place in the Google x Biodesign challenge.

Their current practice focuses on building expressive systems for bioprocessing and collaborative artifact creation with local artists in exploring near-future, and community-centered bio-economies. For this work, Ananda and Crtcl Crafting have received a Future Makers Grant (supported by the City of Toronto) and an Ontario Arts Council grant (2021). Crtcl Crafting is a collective that aims to explore methodologies of small-scale manufacturing through biology and the nuances of craft.

Ananda is also currently a researcher with Dias:stories (a SSHRC-funded project with the Public Visualization Lab), in researching how Southeast Asian diasporic narratives and storytelling can be expressed through digital mediums and games.

Guilherme Kujawski is a design academic, freelance writer and curator based in São Paulo, Brazil. He holds a MA in Media Art History (Donau-Universität Krems, Austria) and a Ph.D in Architecture (São Paulo University, Brazil). He represents a radical multi-disciplinary expert working at the intersection of art and design, technology and culture, literature and society. He was a crucial contributor to a series of biennale art exhibitions in Brazil that were internationally famous for both the curation of interactive art and the symposia to study the future of cybernetics and intelligent machines. Also, he is a published science-fiction writer and research futurist with a considerable following in Latin American and European countries. His interests, without claiming to be exhaustive, includes theory of resilience, unconventional computing, phenomenology of aesthetic experience, alternative infrastructures, vernacular architecture, bio-fabrication, transition design, soviet movies and critical future thinking.

Over the last 30 years, Dr. Douglas MacLeod, FRAIC, has been creating visionary projects that have transformed the arts, architecture and education – from pioneering work in virtual reality at the Banff Centre to eduSourceCanada, the country’s largest e-learning initiative to date. A registered architect, he is currently the Chair of the Centre for Architecture at Athabasca University – an online program that has quickly grown to be one of the largest and most innovative in the world. MacLeod is also a contributing editor to Canadian Architect Magazine and the former Executive Director of the Canadian Design Research Network. He is also a former Associate with Barton Myers Associates, Los Angeles.

Aadjan van der Helm is a lecturer of Interaction Design at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft. Aadjan and the LASG recently collaborated on a pilot curriculum that explored the potential for open-source shape grammars for physical scaffolds to serve as armature for public scaled expressive, responsive works.

Aadjan joined the IDStudiolab at the TU Delft Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering as a research and education assistant in 2000. At this time, he helped other IDStudiolab members integrate computer technology into their experiential prototypes. Gradually Aadjan became more involved in teaching design and with the organization of the Studiolab design research community. He currently holds the position of lecturer in addition to research and organisational responsibilities.