David Merrill

David Merrill is cofounder and president of Sifteo, a company based in San Francisco building the future of play. Sifteo's first product is a tabletop user interface for play and learning made of interactive physical+graphical tiles.

David is a graduate of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab, where he studied with professor Pattie Maes and developed the first prototype of Siftables.

His research and commercial work explores how human interactions with computers can leave the limitations of the desktop interface behind, through the development of physical-digital tools that operate comfortably in our real-world environment to enable new forms of play, expressivity, problem-solving, and collaboration.

David holds a PhD and an SM from the MIT Media Lab, and an MS in computer science and a BS in symbolic systems from Stanford University. He was a Mayfield fellow in 2001, and was awarded graduate fellowships from Motorola and Samsung at MIT. He has lectured in computer science at Stanford University and led music controller design workshops at the MIT Media Lab.