To send someone into space, we needed brilliant and technically capable scientists.

But not just scientists alone – we needed politicians to rally funding, logistics teams to build supply chains, janitors to keep the facilities running, and most importantly, the everyday person who was inspired by the dream of extraterrestrial exploration. It goes without saying that progress at this scale doesn’t happen in isolation. It very much is a cultural movement and a collective effort where belief itself becomes a resource, one that converts into financial and social currency to turn improbable feats into reality.

In other words, the space race was more than a scientific endeavor. It became a symbol of human progress, national pride, and the ideological competition of the Cold War. Collective belief creates a social and political environment that sustains long-term efforts. Without public support, the political and market-driven will to fund and prioritize such ambitious projects can wane. But when everyone’s aligned, magic happens: people mobilize resources, ideas, and momentum that achieve even the impossible. Progress is fundamentally grounded in this understanding.

There are also other paradigm-shifting moments, like the Internet, the Human Genome Project, or even the development of COVID-19 vaccines. These are equal parts technical breakthroughs, equal parts cultural phenomena. They happened because the moment demanded them, and the zeitgeist fueled them. All point to the phenomena of how public buy-in accelerated scientific progress towards a unified vision.

MESH’s Beginnings and Core Thesis

At Digital Architecture Lab, we’re obsessed with the idea of sensibility: an acute awareness of the subtle dynamics—social, cultural, and environmental—that shape and inform how ideas and technologies are created, interpreted, and applied. Context is imperative to understanding not just the “Thing” (or the technological breakthrough) itself, but the things around the Thing: the ecosystem and conditions that birthed it; the cultural cues, the social momentum, the memetic potential. It’s crucial to examine this environment, especially if we want to reproduce similar outcomes.

MESH Studio is built upon the thesis that culture, collective belief, and public participation are essential to accelerating research outcomes. We’re here to bridge the gap between frontier research and public imagination—to make the abstract feel real and to turn complex technologies into something people can relate to, play with, and even shape.

Last year, we conducted an experiment where we explored how physical spaces can embody governance concepts—turning a bar menu into an interactive site for community decision-making. The installation was successful in catalyzing conversations around governance in practice, so we decided to create a studio to incubate and fund similar kinds of interactive research. Our broader focus is to interpret emerging technologies like blockchain, artificial life, and probabilistic programming into something relatable to the everyday inquirer. Science isn’t only for scientists; it’s for anyone willing to ask questions and explore.

MESH is a vehicle for our lab to fund tangible and culturally relevant explorations in research – from both institutional and citizen perspectives. Ultimately, this is about building more resilient digital architecture, one that is built off a shared dialogue; one that is open-ended and divergent, the antidote to collective generalization. This architecture is essentially one that acts as scaffolding for emergent cultures to grow, and therefore, new technologies to be birthed. Inspiring the citizen scientist is our way of mobilizing the public to vote and contribute towards worlds worth developing and living in.

We ask questions like: Who is this technology really for? Who actually benefits? What is an ideal world, and how should we create it together?

We’re not looking for answers from only experts, we’re inviting everyone to weigh in and to contribute their diverse perspectives. When the public becomes part of the process, the end product is more flexible and responsive to societal needs. We’re not just building for the world, we’re building with it. 

Connective Research

When we first released our open call to research, we attracted applicants from more than 10 cities across North America, Europe and Asia. After 30+ interviews, we selected four research teams (two from Japan, and two from overseas) to incubate. Our fellowship incubated researchers, both institutional and independent, who created projects expressing digital architecture in tangible ways, ranging from collective input / governance, data sensors, emergent learning processes from organic agents, and human connection facilitated by technology.

Each project is a reflection of the ethos we champion: research that’s not just about discovery but about engagement, inspiration, and connection.

  • Biotopy: A game and interactive installation where players terraform a virtual planet by growing microbial cultures in a Raspberry Pi-powered bioreactor. 
  • Digital Terrarium: A container where holograms of evolving digital life forms react to real-world environmental data; synthetic evolution visualized.
  • Computing Shrines: Public, interactive portals that create intimate, site-specific experiences via small computing rigs—light, sound, and memory as offerings connecting two physical spaces via digital mechanisms.
  • Internet-Controlled Organ: An interactive musical installation blending historic architecture in Fukuoka with generative AI, allowing online and in-person audiences to co-create music: Twitch plays Pokémon, but with a melodic twist.


One thing that these projects have in common is that they dually advance research, and also extend invitations to explore, question, and participate in technological outcomes.

At MESH, the projects we fund is not only evaluated by its scientific merit but also by its potential to inspire and benefit a wider audience. We support projects that can illustrate the complexity of modern-day research in a dynamic, interactive, and sometimes provocative way: education disguised as novel experiences that invite discourse on big topics.

Through this initiative, we aim to transform the research landscape into a garden that nurtures both scientific and societal progress — and hey, maybe we can put another man on the moon while we are at it…




Michelle Huang is an Experience Architect at DAL. She is creative technologist and founder of Akiya Collective. (michellehuang42@gmail.com)

Illustration: Soryung Seo
Edits: Janine Liberty