Sophie is a designer and researcher, currently a Master’s student in Healthcare & Design at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, where she focuses on designing and building programmable materials for healthcare, to change the way we heal and treat the human body. By embedding computation and medical agents into physical materials, Sophie is interested to understand how material systems can infer usage and respond with new functions and behaviours. Sophie has been working as an Experience Technologist at BMW Group for the past 11 years and has been a Visiting Scholar at Self-Assembly Lab MIT, where she developed ‘Active Textile Tailoring’, garments that better conform to our bodies and ‘Active BioWear’, wearables that reveal information about ourselves, interfacing with the compartments in our body.
Previously being trained as a textile designer at Burg Giebichenstein, University of Art & Design Germany, Sophie believes that materials can be programmed to sense and display information via controlled change in colour, texture and shape, to design for self-discovery and wellbeing in increasingly challenging environments.
Sophie’s work has been exhibited at venues like the Science Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, London and Ars Electronica, Linz and has been featured in many international magazines.
Sophie Richter 