Limbiko. The new input device.

Medical doctor, University of Zurich, then MIT. He won his first research prize, at nineteen in the lab of Walter Schaffner, for a new variant of the enhancer-trap, the switch that decides when a gene is expressed. That work became the first of several scientific publications. Schaffner switched on his inner child and he could never switch it off again. Patrik looks at any problem the way a child does, curious, with no preconceived notions. He read race-car suspension and aerodynamics books to unwind, machines have always talked to him — they have souls, they dance, they behave naughty or nice.

Then MIT: nine years as a research scientist in the lab of Nobel Laureate Susumu Tonegawa, investigating how mental states alter memory and decision-making functions. Takagaki, a mentor in Tonegawa’s group, taught him: don’t look at the mountain, look at every step. Molecular biology taught him the rest — you learn from everyone, and you never hoard what you know.

At the MIT Media Lab, with his thesis advisor Bill Mitchell he asked the question this company still runs on: can we design from love? Mitchell held architecture, computation and the city in a single thought, and made Patrik stop apologising for working across fields. Neil Gershenfeld put the machines in his hands — if you cannot build it, you do not understand it. He took that to the Ferrari innovation team in Maranello as a human interface specialist, and to Volkswagen.

Nine patents sit behind the work: wheel-embedded car suspension (remember the books?), ways to use your body as an input device, and a digital fabrication assembler. On his return to Switzerland, Patrik created the Limbic Chair, the first chair to combine neuroscience with ergonomics: free the pelvis and legs to move independently, and stimulate the limbic system instead of immobilising the body against it. CHF1.6M in sales of a very premium product proved the concept and tested markets as an input device. Medicine, neuroscience, engineering, the obsession underneath them is movement, combining our brain and body.

She invented the haptic trackpad and led its development at Apple. Bianca was born in Brazil to a Chinese mother and Italian father; she speaks seven languages fluently. She studied Computer Science at MIT and worked in the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group under Hiroshi Ishii — the lab that invented the discipline of physical, embodied interfaces. Ishii’s mission was always to create interfaces that liberate us from the “pixel empire.”

At the Harvard GSD, she took classes in theory of modern design, where she was deeply inspired when meeting Alessi industrial designer Michael Graves. He told the story of his experience of becoming paraplegic, the depth of which she realized years later when she suffered a spinal injury. The sudden absence of the function of her body deepened her understanding of design.

Then Apple. Designer and prototyper in Apple’s Human Interface Device Prototyping Group: seven people inventing interactions for hardware that did not exist yet. Nine issued US patents came out of those years, the core of them covering Force Touch and the Taptic Engine: continuous haptic and visual feedback mapped to the force a user applies. The haptic trackpad in every MacBook is her work.

She left Apple to found Bloom Blanket: a textile design studio inspired by origami and based in mathematics. The project was funded on the most successful Kickstarter campaign in Spain at the time. Geometry, materials, European manufacturing and a paying market — end to end, by one person.

After Bloom, Bianca worked in deep tech and created interfaces for exploring music with spatial audio, for which she holds another patent. She is a pianist, composer and singer, performing internationally with her creative technology installations, bossa nova collaborations, and neo-soul quartet. Force, texture, sound in space, Limbiko: the obsession underneath all of it is making the digital world sensory.