Rui Ma
RESEARCHER
systems meet
living ones
translate · materialize
before they have a category.
awards &
honours
selected systems
I start from the phenomenon underneath a system: what it measures, what it treats as signal, what it calls a result. Three systems and a recent essay on what components inherit:
A live body reads as present; a replayed recording breaks. That's where ION begins.
A Wise Horse / ION ↗
A trust and integrity layer for systems that read from or act on the human body. It begins with live presence: distinguishing a living, coupled biological process from a detached sample or replay.
PulpaTronics ↗
Chipless RFID lasered directly onto paper: identification without silicon, built through product identity, prototypes, pitch architecture, and partner-facing narrative.
Embodied Signal Systems
The body as an interface: EDA, pulse, and EMG mapped into fluid, form, and sound, with emotion treated as a continuous field rather than a category.
Open the unit, withdraw the support it depends on, and see what it still requires. Open the instrument ↗
Borders Inside the Component ↗
A design inquiry into what nature makes necessary, and what human hands once made, followed through one transformer: a protection link left out because protection upstream already does the job, two “identical” units whose impedance requirements do not overlap, and a national border inside the bill of materials.
read a system
One method underneath every project: four moves.Pick a system and watch it being read.
{{ rObs }}
{{ rDec }}
{{ rTra }}
{{ rMat }}
about
Research-led design engineering across engineering, human-computer interaction, and physical and digital prototyping. Each project moves from human, social, scientific, and technical research to a prototype, interface, service, or system that can be tested.
Trained in philosophy of mind and continental philosophy: mind and artificial intelligence (Turing, Searle, Dreyfus, Chalmers, Varela, Zed Adams), existentialism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), German idealism (Kant, Hegel), critical theory and feminist philosophy (Foucault, Butler, Chiara Bottici), psychoanalysis, social ontology, aesthetics and tragedy, and animal and environmental ethics (Alice Crary). It taught me how categories are built, how power hides inside language, and how systems decide what becomes legible.
Training in material, body, construction, surface, and identity, reading the body as a designed system before biological signals.
When I enter a field, I teach myself the science from first principles and ask why the tools work the way they do. Every stage of discovery is a scientific choice as well as a design choice.