“We are all exposed to certain information in the environment, but coming together and expressing that information is what turns that information into knowledge.” Designer Neri Oxman, at the Connecticut Forum, on the power of collaboration.

In this week’s update, President & CEO David Lavin talks about his tour of Neri Oxman’s MIT Media Lab, and welcomes Reza Aslan and Jessica Jackley to New York City.

Scales, skin, and other natural patterns have inspired Neri Oxman, director of the Mediated Matter research group at the MIT Media Lab, to create functional skins and armor that also wouldn’t seem out of place in an art gallery.

Here are some photos of Neri Oxman’s work from core77. Oxman, a professor at MIT’s Media Lab, manages to create work that “seems so biological and organic, yet every piece is fabricated from machines and man-made technologies.” Her signature style of biomimicry — drawing design inspiration from nature — has put her on the map as one of the world’s top young designers.

MIT designer, architect, and polymath Neri Oxman takes us into her lab to talk about the future of design: it won’t be about how materials look, but how they behave. Via SEED magazine: “Rather than try to solve a design problem through some abstract notion of how that building should look according to the ways we traditionally think about buildings, I’m trying to see if new forms can emerge out of incorporating new scientific processes into design.”