Announcing the 2026 CodeLab Grant Winners
We are thrilled to announce the recipients of the 2026 CodeLab Grants. This grant program, made possible by a generous 2024 gift from Autodesk, supports experimental research and pedagogical projects that explore the intersection of design, computing, and the built environment.
The Computational Design Laboratory (CodeLab) at CM-A serves as an interdisciplinary hub where faculty and students reimagine the interplay of computing and space. This year’s awardees were selected for their potential to advance critical perspectives on emerging technologies like AI, machine learning, and robotics.
2026 Grant Recipients
Diderot’s Database: Deploying Machine Learning Data for Human Empowerment and Creativity
Team: Vernelle Noel, Josh Bard, and Dina El Zanfaly
Project Brief: Given the veritable arms race to capture human dexterous gestures for machine learning applications in robotics, how can we establish best practices for demonstration capture, expand access to archives of human demonstration data, and broaden the imagined applications of machine learning in communities of craft and manual skill? In the spirit of Diderotʼs Encyclopédie* — an enlightenment project best known for its radical inclusion of the mechanical arts in the core taxonomy of human knowledge — our team will explore the creation, curation, and application of human demonstration data archives through a survey of capture practices and first-hand experiments capturing and archiving data.
Unspoken Continuity: Re-Braiding Cybernetics & Artificial Intelligence
Team: Paul Pangaro and Jill Fain Lehman
Project Brief: The Re-Braiding Cybernetics & Artificial Intelligence Project seeks to bring these two fields back into conversation in order to enrich their respective approaches to machine intelligence and human-machine collaboration. This proposal seeks funding for faculty and student support for the design, curation, and dissemination of the critical dialectic that emerges from a series of mini-symposia with important researchers of prior and current eras of these two fields. The mini-symposia will move through timely themes based on histories and critiques, coupled to a month-by-month evolution of critical topics with impact on the future of AI in society.
Why AI Workshops: Building Critical Fluencies at the Intersection of Design Research and Artificial Intelligence
Team: Daragh Byrne
Project Brief: This experimental workshop series bridges pedagogy and research to cultivate critical AI fluencies through research-through-design methods. Five intensive weekend workshops engage students in questioning, dismantling, and reimagining AI—moving beyond tool use to critical inquiry into intelligence, creativity, and computational practice. Students employ methods including critical making, speculative prototyping, and comparative analysis to produce tangible artifacts (books, visualizations, films) while examining AI’s metaphors, mechanisms, values, and creative implications. The series pilots pedagogical approaches that can lead to an AOS, generating publishable research on critical AI pedagogy while strengthening CodeLab’s commitment to problematizing AI’s entanglements with design, materials, and environment.
Unruly Ruled Surfaces: Experiments in Tensile Birch Bark Membrane Structures
Team: Matthew Z Huber
Project Brief: Birch Bark is a traditional building material with remarkable qualities – tensile strength, pliability, and water resistance. Once treasured for use in rice baskets, cladding, and canoe construction by indigenous peoples in North America; roofing, waterproofing, woven shoes, and utensils in Scandinavia, this unique forest product is now largely discarded as waste byproduct in industrial timber processing, largely due to its “unruly” or non-standard behavior. This project proposes a computational process to scan, map, and predict the geometric behavior of this natural material for use in panelized, stitch-fastened tensile membrane structures through the design and fabrication of a prototype shade structure.
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