Prototype ① :
Root Watching

Root Watching invites everyday people to slow down, imagine the unseen, and reconnect with nature’s quiet systems. Built using p5.js, it offers a browser-based experience that encourages gentle observation—attending to what lies beneath the surface, both literally and metaphorically. It becomes a small act of noticing, sensing, and forming care toward the more-than-human world.

Prototype ②
Game of Life Pixel Pad

Game of Life Pixel Pad is an interactive experiment built using p5.js and PoseNet that invites users to slow down in front of the screen and engage with pixels as if they were alive. Instead of a mouse, the drawing is done by gently moving your nose—tracked in real time through the webcam. Inspired by cellular automata, it offers a fun, screen-based space to imagine otherworldly systems—where patterns grow, dissolve, and reassemble in cycles.

Prototype ③
Hearing Life

Hearing Life is a generative sound experiment built using VCV Rack and a plugin called Imagine by pachde One —a visual sampler that transforms images into eccentric sources of voltage, gates, and triggers. In this prototype, imagery of nature is turned into frequencies that pulse through a sequencer, producing a never-ending beat. It’s a playful exploration of how visual elements from the natural world can be reimagined as rhythm—an attempt to hear life through patterns, pulses, and poetic circuitry.

• "sounds like aqua-marine.. it's like super-deep ocean vibes" - Yvar, 20




• "coral reafs, ocean waves. abit ASMR-vibe" - Zaxer, 21

Prototype ④
Sonic Head Scratcher

Sonic Head Scratcher is a curated Spotify playlist that began with Yosi Horikawa’s track Bubbles, and my fascination with his field recording techniques—capturing the textures of nature and layering them into rhythm. Built around that tingling, ASMR-like sensation, the playlist blends natural and electronic sounds into something whimsical, dancey, and cartoonish.

• "Tipton treats sound like silly putty, material to be pulled, stretched and mangled to produce unidentifiable new forms"

Prototype ⑤
Feelers

Feelers is intended to be a wearable prototype that translates human touch into tiny vibrations, echoing how insects sense the world through their antennae.The design of the prosthetic was intended to be built with a capacitive sensor and a vibration motor, allowing it to translate gentle touch into tiny pulses of feedback. Think of it as a bug prosthetic for the curious human: a gentle tool for tuning into your surroundings with insect-like empathy.

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Prototype ⑥
A Friendly Hand

A Friendly Hand is a paper-based sensing machine that performs a slow, clumsy choreography in response to light. Built using an Arduino, micro servo, and LDR sensor, its hand-like form was inspired by the mycorrhizal network—often imagined as roots reaching out beneath the forest floor. When light from a screen changes, the hand gently pulls and releases a thread, as if waving, reaching, or maybe just trying its best to say hello. Intended not as a solution but a gesture, A Friendly Hand invites viewers to reconsider the signals we send and receive across species, wires, and wavelengths. It’s part prosthetic, part puppet—fully speculative.

Outcome ①
A Friendly Hand Slowly Becoming

An exploratory phase where I imagined how A Friendly Hand might stage a speculative interaction with a tree. This involved experimenting with materials, creating visual sketches while navigating personal philosophies in design—ultimately shaping a vision of what the prototype could communicate in an everyday setting.

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Outcome ②
A Friendly Hand Interface

Built with birch plywood — a subtle nod to the mutualistic relationships between birch and fir trees — the A Friendly Hand interface choreographs light, movement, and imagination. It allows users to control three different black-and-white animations — Carbon, Glow, and Pulse — each influencing how the paper hand responds and moves. Inspired by retro control panels, the interface transforms everyday screens into a playful stage, turning technology into a medium for slowness, curiosity, and more-than-human gestures.

Outcome ③
Field Trip: A Friendly
Hand in the Wild

Testing slow gestures and speculative connections in an open field. As part of the research, A Friendly Hand was brought outdoors — into an open field at Woodleigh, Singapore. This field trip wasn’t about proving functionality; it was about staging a moment of wonder and reflection. By pairing synthetic gestures with natural surroundings, it asked: What kind of attention do we offer to things that can’t speak back?