Ishii pioneered the Tangible User Interface in the field of Human-computer interaction with the paper "Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms",[1] co-authored with his then PhD student Brygg Ullmer.

and Ph.D. in computer engineering from Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.

[3] Ishii relocated from Japan's NTT Human Interface Laboratories in Yokosuka, where he had made his mark in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in the early 1990s.

In 2019, Ishii received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award.

[5] He was named to the 2022 class of ACM Fellows, "for contributions to tangible user interfaces and to human-computer interaction".