He joined the MIT Media Laboratory in October 1995, and founded the Tangible Media Group to pursue a new vision of Human Computer Interaction: "Tangible Bits." His team seeks to change the "painted bits" of desktop computers to "tangible bits" by giving physical form to digital information and computation. Ishii and his students have presented their vision of "Tangible Bits" at a variety of academic, industrial design, and media art venues including ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, and Ars Electronica, emphasizing that the development of tangible interfaces requires the rigor of both scientific and artistic review. Since July 2002, Ishii has co-directed the Thing That Think Consortium at the MIT Media Lab.