The Augmentation Residency
A shared home for people building unconventional things. Spend the day with circuit boards, code, and new ideas. Spend dinner asking what any of it means.
Our summer residencies brought builders together in 2023, 2024, and 2025 to live, experiment, and turn their own ideas into working prototypes.
The 2025 cohort, at a glance
The workshop and the dinner table belong to the same experiment. Building a technology also means trying it, sharing it, and asking what it changes about being human.
Meet the communityIn 2023 the residents' living room was the workshop, with 3D printers, oscilloscopes, soldering stations, XR equipment and brain-computer-interface headsets. In 2025 the lab rented three houses in Cambridge, next to or near one another, and ran them as one residency.
In 2023, residents tried what they built on themselves, which the CHI 2024 paper describes as self-experimenting. Their projects included a ring that vibrates near magnetic fields and an augmented reality headset that shows another person's biological data, such as heart rate or temperature.
In 2023 the lab tried a two-track method: build a high-tech and a low-tech version of the same idea in parallel, then compare them. For the posture wearable iHunch, that meant a circuit board with motion and flex sensors on one side, and elastic posture tape on the other.
In 2023, residents often started on their projects as soon as they got up and worked all day. Many evenings ended with a shared dinner where they discussed existential questions they had written down and put in a hat. On the About page, this pairing of hammer and pen is what the lab means by a philosopher-builder. During that residency it also wrote and printed a zine, Augmentation as (a Lens for) Living.
The work, year by year
2025
June 15 – August 25, 2025
Headpieces that project your emotions onto someone else
Recording and reproducing smell
Matchmaking where your friends do the swiping
The theme, Rhizome Futurism, asked what it means to build for a future where AGI goes right. On August 23, 2025, the residents presented 13 projects at the Human Augmentation Summit 2025 in a round of short talks on stage, most under three and a half minutes, then at their booths in the exhibition.
They included CodeProse, an open-source IDE whose documentation updates itself when you save; Engagic, which runs city council agenda packets through language models and covered 800 cities when presented; and Olfactory Sensing, which aims to record a smell and reproduce it anywhere.
2024
Summer 2024, announced for July 1 – August 31
BCI cyborg fashion
A speculative artificial womb and wearable incubator
Augmenting relationships through AI-mediated role-play
Seeed Studio sponsored the 2024 residency and announced hardware for its residents, including XIAO microcontroller boards, the SenseCAP Watcher and the Grove Vision AI module.
The announced topics ran from fine-tuning local and open-source language models, memory architectures and multi-agent systems to PCB design, product fabrication, the history of wearable computing, and policy for personal AI.
During the residency the Strange Loops mask, a brain-computer interface that turns emotional states into colored light, gained a dress. The live demos at the Human Augmentation Summit 2024, at the MIT Media Lab, included Strange Loops II, Preemie and Enact.
2023
Summer 2023, ten weeks
A sixth sense for magnetic fields
Augmenting relationships through AI-mediated role-play
Interoception and interpersonal senses
Planning started in March 2023. The four co-founders and Courtnie Paschall wrote the program up as a nine-page case study for CHI 2024, including the problems it ran into and what they would change.
At Demo Day, Aida Baradari and Alice Cai showed The Empathy Machine live: it reads one person's muscle activity and replays it onto another person's body through electrical muscle stimulation.
Get involved
Ask about future residencies, help organize, or support a resident and their equipment. We announce future dates when they are confirmed.
Past residents have made a 15 × 15 mm circuit board for a ring, a tool that makes city council agendas readable, and an installation of origami butterflies that grew into a dragon. The first cohort, in 2023, were students and young professionals; the 2025 call asked for people 18 or older with an existing body of work.
In 2023, close to 200 people applied. The application asked for initial project ideas, and the founders selected residents for creativity, fit with the lab's interests, technical background, and a mix of experience and skills. In 2025, applicants sent a one- to five-minute video, or a written answer, on what they would work on.
The lab's four co-founders, Aida Baradari, Alice Cai, Dünya Baradari and Treyden Chiaravalloti, ran the first residency in 2023. The lab lists Aida, Alice, Treyden and the organizer Yasmeen Hmaidan as mentors.
The 2024 organizers were Dünya Baradari, Treyden Chiaravalloti, Aida Baradari, Yasmeen Hmaidan, AnhPhu Nguyen and Tryanni Chiaravalloti. For 2025, Dünya Baradari, the lab's managing director, asked the community on Discord who wanted to help run it. On the Community directory, six people are listed as both residents and organizers in 2025, and the organizing work listed there includes applications, fundraising and summit operations.
The lab recruited its 2025 residency organizers on its Discord, through an open call to the community.
All 13 project talks from the summit stage, most under three and a half minutes, are recorded on the summit page.
For dates and applications, write to contact@augmentationlab.org.
In 2024, Seeed Studio sponsored the residency and announced hardware for its residents. To fund a resident's place or equipment, email contact@augmentationlab.org.
