Zoe Laughlin is a name that resonates across disciplines. At once an artist, engineer, materials scientist, presenter and maker, she has built a public and academic reputation on exploring how we sense — see, touch, taste, hear — the physical world of substances. Her endeavour is not simply to analyse materials but to re-animate them: to reawaken their poetics, their hidden narratives, and to show how objects affect us in ways we rarely articulate.
Early Life, Education and Formation
Zoe Laughlin’s pathway is not one that neatly fits traditional silos. She studied fine art and design, undertaking an MA (Master of Arts) at Central Saint Martins in London. Her artistic curiosity drew her into materials — how they are made, how they behave, how they speak. Motivated by this curiosity, she pursued doctoral work in materials science, culminating in a PhD from King’s College London, where she examined the interplay between physical substance and sensory experience.
Her PhD work did not remain locked in academia; instead, it became the theoretical grounding for the Institute of Making, an interdisciplinary workshop and research space that places materials at the heart of inquiry. In many ways, her educational arc embodies the bridging of art and science, where the studio and the laboratory inform one another.
Institute of Making: Vision, Practice and Philosophy
The Institute of Making is perhaps Laughlin’s most enduring institutional legacy. Co-founded along with colleagues in 2010 and integrated into University College London (UCL) in the subsequent years, it is a physical workshop, a library of materials, and a locus of sensory exploration.
The Materials Library
At the core of the Institute lies its Materials Library — a curated archive of hundreds of materials, from commonplace plastics to exotic alloys, from foods to biological tissues. Visitors are encouraged to engage with the materials — to touch them, to smell them, to sense how they respond in space. The library is not a silent exhibit; it is a living, breathing instrument of learning.
Making, Prototyping and Experimentation
The Institute is also a workshop: it offers tools — CNC machines, 3D printers, saws, mills, kiln, casting apparatus — for rapid prototyping and material experimentation. Students, academics and public visitors alike are welcome to use the tools, test ideas, and interrogate how materials perform, fracture, deform. The friction between imagination and material constraint becomes a site for creative exploration.
Philosophy of “Sensoaesthetics”
Zoe Laughlin’s central conceptual framework is often described as sensoaesthetics — the idea that materials are not only objects with mechanical and chemical properties, but also carriers of sensory meaning: taste, smell, resonance, texture, colour. She encourages us to abandon the sterile binaries of object and subject and instead to see how human perception and materiality co-produce one another.
Through her work, materials are not silent; they “speak” to the user through their response to handling, their acoustic resonance, even their taste in controlled experiments. Her aim is to make us more aware of these dialogues, more literate in the language of things.
Research, Projects and Selected Works
Laughlin’s portfolio is expansive. Here are some key projects and directions in her work:
Sounding Objects, Sounding Materials
One strand of her research probes the acoustic signatures of materials — how they resonate, how they handle vibration, how one might hear the hidden voice of a ceramic, a piece of plastic, a metal plate. In certain experiments, she has cut material into forms that respond at particular frequencies; in others, she has asked how sound might sculpt or erode a material over time.
Taste and Materials
In a provocative twist, she has asked: can you taste a material? Her experiments have submerged taste receptors to the realm of matter, not just food: how does metal feel on the tongue, how do ceramics in glazes influence the gustatory experience? These efforts aim to remap the boundary between material science and gastronomic perception.
Public Engagement Through Media
Laughlin is not confined to the lab or the workshop. She has presented several BBC programmes: How to Make (2020) explores the transformation of raw materials into everyday objects; The Secret Story of Stuff (2018) examines hidden histories and supply chains behind common items; she has contributed to Planespotting Live (2019) and appeared on radio shows such as The Kitchen Cabinet. Her media presence is driven by a desire to make materials intelligible to general audiences, to peel back the veneer of everyday objects and reveal their backstories.
Exhibitions and Displays
Her work has been exhibited in prominent venues such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Design Museum, the Tate, and the Wellcome Collection. In these contexts, her material experiments take on public form: interactive installations, tactile exhibits, sensorial invitations. Objects become interlocutors.
Teaching, Mentorship and Institutional Roles
In addition to her creative output, Laughlin is deeply involved in mentoring, teaching and institutional leadership. She judges design awards, contributes to university courses bridging engineering and art, and advocates for integrating material thinking into pedagogy. Her role is not only as creator and thinker, but as a catalyst: she often encourages others — students, researchers, visitors — to imagine new relations between form, function and sensation.
She has received honours such as the Institution of Engineering Designers’ “Inspire, Support, Achieve” Award in recognition of her bridging work. Over the years, she has become a public figure for those interested in design, material science, art, and sensory culture.
The Central Themes and Contributions
What is it that makes Zoe Laughlin especially significant? Below are the core contributions and themes in her career:
Re-enchantment of Matter
In a time when many see materials as inert resources or anonymous commodities, Laughlin challenges that perspective. She suggests that matter is alive in its own way: it resists, responds, reflects. She invites us to re-enchant our world by treating materials not as disposable substrates but as interlocutors in design.
Transdisciplinarity
She refuses strict disciplinary boundaries. Her trajectory encompasses art, design, engineering, chemistry, acoustics, gastronomy, and science communication. That transdisciplinarity is not gratuitous but central: the creative friction between domains is where she locates insight.
Sensory Literacy
Laughlin wants us to become more attuned to our material entanglements. To taste, feel, hear, smell what matter does; to learn not only structure and stress but texture and timbre. That sensory literacy is a tool — for designers to make more meaningful things, and for general people to live more consciously in their environments.
Public Engagement and Accessibility
By stepping into media — television, radio, exhibitions — Laughlin demystifies high-level material research. She does not favour jargon or exclusion. Her mission includes bringing material thinking to a wider public, helping people see that everyday objects have stories, histories, politics.
Material Narratives and Ethics
Underneath her work is an ethical dimension: materials are not neutral. They carry environmental footprints, social histories, cultural meanings. Laughlin’s work often asks us to interrogate the origins of materials — mining, extraction, scarcity, waste — and to imagine more sustainable, responsible futures.
Challenges, Critiques and Open Questions
No figure is beyond questioning, and Laughlin’s work invites critique as much as admiration.
Accessibility vs Depth
In translating complex material science to public media, one potential risk is oversimplification. Striking the balance between depth and accessibility is an ongoing challenge in her broadcasting and exhibitions.
Sensory Subjectivity
When dealing with taste, smell, touch and sound, subjective variation is wide. What feels, tastes or sounds a certain way to one individual may differ. How does one standardise or compare across bodies? Laughlin’s work acknowledges this, but the problem remains an epistemological challenge.
Environmental Footprint
While she foregrounds materials, she also must grapple with their ecological costs. Using exotic materials or energy-intensive processes for art or research raises questions. Critics may ask: is the making of material experiments always justified? Can the same insights be achieved with low-impact materials?
Institutional Constraints
Operating at the intersection of art and science means navigating funding systems, publication norms, engineering standards, and sometimes conflicting expectations. Maintaining institutional support for hybrid practice is not trivial.
Why Zoe Laughlin Matters Now
In our contemporary age, the relevance of her work is particularly strong.
Material sustainability is central. As society confronts resource scarcity, climate change and the circular economy, Laughlin’s sensitivity to material provenance, reuse and storytelling becomes a model for responsible making.
Human–object entanglement defines our lives. We live surrounded by screens, objects, sensors, synthetic materials. Yet we often relate to them superficially. Laughlin encourages deeper engagement — not detachment but relational immersion.
Interdisciplinary innovation drives breakthroughs. Many of the greatest leaps arise between disciplines. Laughlin’s practice is a reminder that crossing boundaries can generate fresh insight, whether in design, engineering, architecture or beyond.
Public science and literacy are vital. In times when public trust in science and technology is contested, her ability to communicate, to make tangible the invisible, helps build bridges between specialist communities and everyday life.
Future Directions
What might lie ahead for Zoe Laughlin and for the domain she shapes?
She may increasingly turn toward sustainable and regenerative materials, pushing experiments in biomaterials, compostable substrates and waste streams.
Her work may leverage digital fabrication more deeply — integrating AI, sensor feedback, responsive materials that change with user interaction.
We might see international offshoots: local “materials studios” in different cultural contexts, where local materials are re-explored through the lens of sensoaesthetics.
Collaborative projects with architects, textile designers, sound artists or chefs could expand the reach of her sensorial materials approach into spaces, garments and foods.
More formal theoretical output may emerge: treatises or manifestos bridging aesthetics, material ethics and sensory philosophy.
Conclusion
Zoe Laughlin stands as a boundary-walker: someone who refuses to see matter as mute, who insists that materials speak, respond and implicate us. Her creative, scientific and communicative practices invite us into a renewed material consciousness — one in which we understand not only how things are made, but how they live, feel and resonate within us.
Her significance lies not merely in producing art or scientific papers, but in shifting how we as designers, makers, thinkers and citizens engage the material world. As climate pressures mount and technological systems proliferate, that shift in attention may be one of the essential human tasks of our age.
