About

Sophia Brueckner, born in Detroit, MI, is a futurist artist, designer, and engineer with a background deeply rooted in computer science and digital media. She received her Sc.B. in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Brown University, her MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design, and her MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, where she investigated the empowering and controlling aspects of technology within computer programming, algorithms, user experience design, and tangible interfaces. Brueckner has worked as a software engineer at Google, designing and implementing products used by tens of millions and engaging in experimental projects within Google Research. Since 2011, she has taught courses combining sci-fi, extrapolative thinking, prototypes, and ethics at institutions including MIT, Harvard, RISD, Brown, and the University of Michigan, with her work and the projects from her classes receiving international recognition. She is the founder and creative director of Tomorrownaut, a creative studio focusing on speculative futures and sci-fi-inspired prototypes. Currently, she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's Stamps School of Art and Design and School of Information, where she teaches sci-fi prototyping, digital fabrication, creative programming, design, and art + technology. Her ongoing objective is to combine her background in design and engineering with her perspective as an artist to inspire a more positive future.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Engineering
• Artificial Intelligence
• Art
• Cognitive science
• Social psychology
• World Wide Web
• Human–computer interaction
• Telecommunications
• Visual arts
• Algorithm
• Aesthetics
• Computer graphics (images)
• Literature
• Architectural engineering

Selected publications

• White Cube / Black Box: Investigating Bias in Museums and Algorithms

  2024-06-06

  article1st authorCorresponding

  White Cube / Black Box seeks to identify bias and the many ways bias gets introduced into and amplified within systems. A highly interdisciplinary team of data scientists, curators, designers, and artists used face detection and race classification algorithms to explore bias in algorithms and University of Michigan Museum of Art’s collection of artworks.

  PublisherDOI

• Investigating Engineering Students’ Consideration of People During Concept Generation

  2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings · 2024-02-20 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  His research is at the intersection of human computer interaction (HCI), visualization, and large-scale data mining of human behavior

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Captured by an algorithm

  2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Algorithm

  Captured by an Algorithm is a commemorative plate series that looks at romance novels through the lens of Amazon Kindle Popular Highlights. A passage in a Kindle e-book becomes a Popular Highlight after a certain number of people independently highlight the same passage. Popular Highlights are displayed as underlined along with the number of times each has been highlighted by a reader. The highlights in romances are not the racy, salacious quotes one might expect. Instead, they reveal the readers' intense feelings of loneliness, grief, and discontent. With all the social technologies available today, it is astonishing to see that so many people feel so lonely.

  PublisherDOI

• Mediating Public Space: Art and Technology That Goes Beyond the Frame Art Gallery

  Leonardo · 2020

  • Computer Science
  • Visual arts
  • Art

  Algotecton (from algorithm and tecton-carpentry, articulation) is a site-specific generative sculpture inspired by the Weaire-Phelan structure, a mathematical construct that approximates the geometry of foam. It comprises 16 interlocking polyhedra fabricated using advanced parametric modeling and computer numerical control (CNC) technologies. Evocative of different natural formations-a crystalline structure, a kelp forest, a molecular compound-the sculpture responds to Kendall Buster's Parabiosis II piece at the street level of the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Algotecton harnesses state-of-theart computational design and fabrication techniques to give material expression to mathematical concepts, invite discovery and playfully transform people's perception of space and form.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Considering People: An Exploratory Investigation of Engineering Student Ideation

  2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings · 2020 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science

  Her research focuses on strategies for design innovations through divergent and convergent thinking

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Captured by an Algorithm

  2019-10-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Captured by an Algorithm is a commemorative plate series that looks at romance novels through the lens of the Amazon Kindle Popular Highlight algorithm. A passage in a Kindle e-book becomes a Popular Highlight after a certain number of people independently highlight the same passage. Popular Highlights show up as underlined along with the number of people who highlighted that passage. Each commemorative plate features a Kindle Popular Highlight from a romance novel and a landscape generated by running Photoshop's Photomerge algorithm on scanned romance novel covers. Over seventy thousand individual acts of highlighting were used to determine the content for this work telling the story of the intense loneliness, grief, vulnerability, and discontent felt by the readers. This work reveals a glimpse of a positive, anonymous social network emerging unintentionally through this minor Kindle feature. This ongoing project draws attention to this existing example of collective social support to change society's vision for the future of social technologies.

  PublisherDOI

• Embodisuit

  2018-03-14 · 14 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Embodisuit allows its wearer to map signals onto different places on their body. Informed by embodied cognition, the suit receives signals from an IoT platform, and each signal controls a different haptic actuator on the body. Knowledge is experienced ambiently without necessitating the interpretation of symbols by the conscious mind. The suit empowers wearers to reconfigure the boundaries of their selves strengthening their connection to the people, places, and things that are meaningful to them. It both critiques and offers an alternative to current trends in wearable technology. Most wearables harvest data from their users to be sent and processed elsewhere. The Embodisuit flips this paradigm such that data is taken in through the body instead. Furthermore, we believe that by changing the way people live with data, it will change the type of data that people create.

  PublisherDOI

• Designing eTextiles for the Body

  2018-03-14 · 12 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  International audience; In this studio, we will improve our tailoring skills in order to better integrate technology into clothing. Leveraging the volumetric nature of clothing, we will create eTextile interfaces that fit the shape of the body and are designed around how bodies move. This studio will consist of a short masterclass led by an expert fashion designer followed by materials experimentation and working on individual projects. We will introduce and demo a variety of ways to design and implement 3-dimensional eTextiles as well as how to integrate them with interactive systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Empathy amulet: a wearable to connect with strangers.

  Ubiquitous Computing · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Empathy Amulet is a wearable interpretation of Philip K. Dick's empathy box from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? [3]. In the novel, thousands of people were anonymously connected with each other both haptically and emotionally when they grabbed the handles of their empathy boxes. The Empathy Amulet similarly networks a group of strangers together through shared experiences of physical warmth. It is not yet another technology for staying in touch with people you already know (and falling short). Rather, it encourages its wearer to make a deliberate and generous choice to invest their time and energy in connection with strangers, and it incorporates reciprocity into its design, such that helping oneself means helping other people. In today's world, people are less likely to feel empathy towards those not in their immediate network of family and friends, and, despite a proliferation of connective technologies, loneliness is on the rise [2, 5]. Surprisingly, it is the perceived sense of loneliness, and not actually being physically alone that has numerous health consequences for a significant portion of the population. Lakoff and Johnson's theory of embodied mind asserts that our physical and subjective experiences are inextricably linked, and the Empathy Amulet leverages the powerful connection between the physical experience of warmth and the subjective experience of social connectedness to combat loneliness and cultivate a stronger sense of connection with strangers [1, 4].

  Publisher

• Empathy amulet

  2018-10-04 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Empathy Amulet is a wearable interpretation of Philip K. Dick's empathy box from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? [3]. In the novel, thousands of people were anonymously connected with each other both haptically and emotionally when they grabbed the handles of their empathy boxes. The Empathy Amulet similarly networks a group of strangers together through shared experiences of physical warmth. It is not yet another technology for staying in touch with people you already know (and falling short). Rather, it encourages its wearer to make a deliberate and generous choice to invest their time and energy in connection with strangers, and it incorporates reciprocity into its design, such that helping oneself means helping other people. In today's world, people are less likely to feel empathy towards those not in their immediate network of family and friends, and, despite a proliferation of connective technologies, loneliness is on the rise [2, 5]. Surprisingly, it is the perceived sense of loneliness, and not actually being physically alone that has numerous health consequences for a significant portion of the population. Lakoff and Johnson's theory of embodied mind asserts that our physical and subjective experiences are inextricably linked, and the Empathy Amulet leverages the powerful connection between the physical experience of warmth and the subjective experience of social connectedness to combat loneliness and cultivate a stronger sense of connection with strangers [1, 4].

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eytan Adar

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  10 shared

• Colleen M. Seifert

  Purdue University System

  10 shared

• Laura R. Murphy

  Washburn University

  10 shared

• Shanna Daly

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  10 shared

• Thanina Makhlouf

  Purdue University System

  9 shared

• Rachel Freire

  Max Planck Institute for Informatics

  5 shared

• David Franusich

  Virginia Tech

  1 shared

• Paul Strohmeier

  Max Planck Institute for Informatics

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• U-M Arts Initiative Grant