The HiLo Lab

We work high and low.

HiLo Lab explores the intersection of advanced design and accessible making. We use high-tech tools and software to generate work that can be fabricated through low-tech, low-impact methods, lowering barriers and expanding access. We embrace “lowly” materials and situate them within sophisticated design contexts. Our processes are responsive, and intentionally easy to adopt, enabling broader use across disciplines and communities.

HiLo Lab is deeply invested in material ecologies, production efficiencies, and sustainable fabrication. While wood and timber often anchor our investigations, we work across a wide range of mediums, including plastics, plants, metals, mycelium, textiles, cellulose, and reclaimed waste. Our hybrid workflows combine analog and digital techniques, valuing low-fidelity tools as much as high-tech systems. Our research centers on expanding the use of second-stream materials like wood waste; increasing access to digital design and fabrication; developing energy-efficient, low-waste construction methods that extend material lifespans; and embracing natural processes, including growth and decay. We prototype new systems, reimagine assembly, and promote circular material practices.

Based at UBC SALA and Cal Poly CAED, HiLo Lab is a post-disciplinary, trans-institutional collective. We challenge conventional authorship through emergent making—guided as much by growth and decay as by deliberate control. Architecture, landscape, art, and design are reimagined from the ground up.

Our Approach

“Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I’ll tell you what kind of man you are.”

– Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

If what we consume defines us, then our buildings, tools, materials, and waste say as much about us as any meal. HiLo Lab embraces this logic. We treat all material – raw, processed, or discarded – as worthy of attention, reimagination, and reuse. We believe the built environment reflects how and what we consume. Design is a continuum. Waste is not failure, it’s a beginning.

At HiLo Lab, we develop high-resolution design strategies using low-barrier, low-impact tools. We work across disciplines and cultures of making, combining advanced computational workflows with analog ingenuity to bring dignity and utility to overlooked matter.

Our work is structured around three interconnected threads:

Materials Research | We study materials as resource, artifact, assembly, living system, and future waste. Our investigations span wood waste, reclaimed plastics, textiles, mycelium, metal, and concrete — each approached as both problem and possibility.

Tools Research | We design and adapt tools, from simple sleds to custom scripts, to democratize making. Tools should be empowering, hackable, accessible, and easy to use across disciplines and contexts. We embrace open-source.

Design Research | We prototype workflows, assemblies, and systems that promote reuse, circularity, decay, death, and rebirth. Our work values what already exists, seeking form through material intelligence, process-based design, and circumstance.

HiLo Lab’s ethos is iterative, inclusive, and collaborative. We practice a bottom-up version of the traditionally top-down disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, art, and design, where all voices are welcome, where low influences high, and thinking is inseparable from doing.

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Support and Thanks

Thank You!

SALA’s HiLo Lab thanks Eco Waste for its ongoing support of our work.
We also acknowledge the Foundation for the Carolinas for their generous donation to the lab.

Get Involved

SALA’s HiLo Lab welcomes financial and material contributions. Our research is resource intensive and we rely on your support to achieve our goals. Donations will be used to support student researchers, purchase select project related equipment and materials, and to secure a permanent lab space. Your help is greatly appreciated.
Thank you.

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