Objects That Carry Feeling: Tangible Interactions at NID
At NID, during my postgraduate program in New Media Design (2019–2021), three projects converged around the same theme, using physical objects and tangible interaction as a medium for human emotion.
Hello: An IoT photo frame for families living apart
In India, when children move away from home, family conversations shift to calls and messages and over time, they grow shorter and more repetitive. Without shared spaces and experiences, there's simply less to talk about. Hello is a smart photo frame designed to change that.
The core insight was that asymmetry of information sparks curiosity. When a child shares a photograph of a new place, a new face, something the parents haven't seen, it creates a natural opening for conversation. The frame sits in the parent's home and displays these photographs. But it goes further: it captures physical interactions with the frame, each sensed through an accelerometer and surfaced as an emotional signal on the child's phone.
The frame recognises five interactions: lifting the frame to look at a new photo, zooming in to examine a detail, stroking a face in the photograph, holding the frame for a long time, and showing it to someone else. Each carries a distinct emotional meaning, spanning curiosity, longing, and excitement.
The concept was tested with a mother-daughter pair and a student living away from home. Responses confirmed the hypothesis. The asynchronous, one-to-one nature of the exchange felt more meaningful than group chats or standard calls.
Skin: A futuristic phone cover
The way we interact with our devices has consequences, both on our relationship with fellow humans and on the devices themselves. We drop them, throw them, and replace them without a second thought. Skin is a critical design project that asks: what if making technology appear vulnerable could change how we treat it?
The hypothesis came from studying how aesthetics induce empathy, drawing on research around anthropomorphism and the conditions that make humans extend care to non-human entities. If a device could be made to appear vulnerable, it might trigger the same instinct. The primary research, conducted through Instagram surveys and internet forums, focused on documenting how people actually treat their phones today, and what kinds of mistreatment are most common.
Skin proposes a phone cover with a memory. It is aware of how it is handled, and over time its surface changes to reflect that history, calling for attention and demanding better care. The concept also carries a social dimension: a symptomatic skin would be visible to others, making it a quiet signal of how a person treats the things, and by extension the beings, around them.
Memory Rolls: Writing with light in public space
I wanted to stage an experience that lets people express themselves in shared spaces. Graffiti is one answer, but it marks and dirties surfaces that belong to everyone. Reverse graffiti, where artists selectively clean dirty surfaces to leave behind images and text, pointed toward a more interesting model.
The interaction came from observing how people naturally touch and turn railings and surfaces as they move through spaces. Combined with the idea of light as a non-destructive medium, this became the core of the design: rollers with alphabets embedded in them, lit from within, that project letters onto the floor as people turn them.
Memory Rolls was developed during the second COVID wave, when collective grief was present everywhere. The rollers became a memorial where people could write the names of those they had lost. The form drew from Tibetan prayer wheels, which carry prayers outward with each rotation. Every name written is remembered, and the rolls cycle through them over time so they are never forgotten.