“Bridging the digital and physical worlds through design”

The company is called StegaMatter, the name representing the company’s blend of steganography, meaning an artful way to hide information, and physical matter.

“What we’re doing is trying to hide information on a physical object,” says Haotian Fang, a master’s student in the EPFL CDH Digital Humanities master’s program who is a co-founder of the company, along with Danpeng Cai, an EPFL sciencepreneur hosted by the Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab), and Xinrun Li, a PhD candidate in Computer Vision at Durham University in the United Kingdom. “We’re trying to bridge the digital and physical worlds through design.”

The company uses steganographic principles to create an interplay of design and information systems. Among the many players in the steganography and security landscape, they put a unique emphasis on design. Instead of applying tags or labels, such as a QR code, that a user would need to scan in order to access data, this information would be encoded in a product, like a luxury bag, through a deliberate inserted manipulation of its material and design properties such as visual patterns and textures.

“In normal industrial solutions, there is a push to decouple information from the design process, which can cause some unneccesary limitations in design and security,” says Fang. “On the other hand, we’re leveraging the design specifically to convey information.”

“For us, design is not passive”

StegaMatter plans to offer these design solutions to companies directly – for example, a luxury designer like Louis Vuitton would be a target customer. The information encoded in the design could be for authentication, brand protection, or storytelling about the product or company.

“We are using design to empower the data encoding and the security so it's more active,” Fang says. “For us, design is not passive.” The team is pushing a new protocol based on empowering design, where subtle visual complexity expressed in patterns is both aesthetically enriching and digitally intelligent. This approach turns design itself into the medium for interaction.

Visual complexity embedding information

The idea for StegaMatter came from Cai, who is a Sciencepreneur, a new designation that allows EPFL graduates to remain affiliated with an EPFL lab after they finish their studies in order to work on a startup.

Cai did his master’s project at ECAL, looking at how visual complexity in product design can embed information. After two years working at EPFL+ECAL Lab, he took an entrepreneurial path to bring that seed to the market. “I think that was the starting point of everything,” Fang says.

Cai then brought in Li, who contributed at early stage and is currently working on his PhD in computer vision at Durham University in the United Kingdom and brings a complementary technical background, and eventually Fang, who he met two years later once Fang began his master’s at EPFL. Currently, the company is in the incubation phase and is being supported by the EPFL Innovaiton Pad.

“A really good environment for entrepreneurship”

Fang found his way to EPFL thanks to his joint majors of philosophy and computer science that he studied for his bachelor’s in the United States. When he was finishing his degree in 2023, like many other graduating students, he was trying to figure out what to do next and was struggling with some existential depression on the topic.

“I was searching for graduate programs in fields like computer science and data science, but I realized that this was not what I was really looking for,” Fang says. “I couldn’t see how these degrees would bring me somewhere I wanted to go. So I started searching again, this time focused on the humanities in the digital world.” EPFL’s program in Digital Humanities was the first the came up on his Google search. “I don’t know how much EPFL paid for that search result,” he laughs. For him, finding the EPFL program was like “a colorful light”, so he applied and ended up in Switzerland.

Fang credits the Digital Humanities master’s program and EPFL in general with his decision to co-create a startup. “The master’s program has been very helpful, because it’s super interdisciplinary, so you’re working with people from different backgrounds,” he says. “And EPFL has a really good environment for entrepreneurship. There are grants to help you build a startup from scratch in different phases, plus lots of researchers and students who are passionate about starting a business.”