Sensory Connection
This collaborative project explored physical human touch in the context of a high-tech society where we are no longer using touch to connect with each other.
Touch is the first language we learn as infants and we use it for instinctive creation of bonds with other people. On a subconscious level, the more we touch someone, the more we feel connected to them — and so the more we trust them.
Old-Fashioned Bonds, New Forms
Touch is the first language we learn as infants. The more we touch someone, the more we feel connected to them — and the more we trust them.
I wanted to explore the old-fashioned kind of bonds created between people and new forms of language, communication, and interaction. How could technology — the very force that has distanced us from physical contact — be used to bring us back to embodied connection?
Using Processing for interactive visualization and Arduino for physical sensing, the project prototyped experiences that translate touch into visible, shareable digital form — making the invisible bonds of physical contact tangible and persistent.
Why This Still Matters
This project was an early experiment in what I now think of as the core design challenge: making invisible human dynamics visible and actionable. The same instinct — sensing something intangible and giving it form — appears in my later work designing AI agents that need to earn trust, CRM systems that surface relationship health, and interaction patterns where the emotional layer is as important as the functional one.
The tools have changed from Arduino to language models, but the question remains: how do you design for the connection between people, not just the transaction?