Most of the information that matters is invisible.
The ocean is warming, but you can't taste it. A whale is communicating, but you can't hear what it means. A strawberry carries the history of everything that was traded away to get it to your supermarket, but nobody taught you to read it.
N+A Labs builds ways to perceive what's already there. Edible installations that translate climate data into something your mouth can understand. Sensory portraits of species whose worlds we've barely begun to map. Seed archives organized not by taxonomy but by the people who taste and grow and blend them. AI agent teams that surface the problems worth working on.
Everything we design sits between the natural and the artificial — natural perception and artificial notation, natural ecosystems and designed experience, natural intelligence and machine intelligence. We are interested in where these intelligences might converge in new ways to support vibrant living and healthy ecosystems.
Problem Genome Project
AI agent teams systematically collecting high-quality unsolved problems for design and engineering students. Structured like the Music Genome Project — problems tagged with "genes" (constraint type, domain, scale, why previous attempts failed) — enabling discovery by structural similarity across fields.
Sensory Atlas: Portraits of Non-Human Perception
A growing collection of exhibition-quality "portraits" of non-human sensory worlds. Each portrait maps what science knows about a species' perception — and what it doesn't. The unknown is the primary medium. Potential collaboration with David Gruber (Project CETI) on underwater whale communication.
"Every notation system in history arose because some domain of human experience was too complex to hold in memory and too important to leave inarticulate."
N+A Labs is currently accepting nominations for leading practitioner fellows.
We work with fellows to build a project with emerging makers, researchers, and designers who work across disciplines.
Interested? Subscribe to receive calls for nominations and applications.
Interested in collaborating?
ames@dartmouth.edu
location
Thayer School of Engineering
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH