Week 3 : Visualising Through Illustrations

This week, I dove deeper into visualising A Friendly Hand and adopted a double-diamond framework to make sense of my winding, sometimes chaotic, but ultimately intentional process.

More Visualisations

Looking back at last week’s sketches, I realised just how many moving parts go into making a paper hand move—to stage a kind of interspecies communication with a tree. There’s an odd balance to strike: the hand should be provocative enough to make people question what they’re seeing, but also inviting, leaving space for their own interpretations. One of my goals for this week is to explore staging a more perceivable ‘extended tree hand’ through visualisations.

① Holding Hands with a Tree: Elongated Paper Hand?

One way to make it look like the tree itself is extending a hand is to physically extend the paper structure from the trunk onto the hand. This creates a visual bridge, a cue that hints at the possibility of trees communicating through touch. If a tree could reach out, what might it want to say?

This illustration builds on last week’s visualisation and adds an elongated paper coming out of the tree with a webcam sensor that detects the human’s emotions, sending signals to close the hand.

② A Tree Emote?

Another idea is to turn the hand into an emoter—reacting to human interaction. When someone hugs the tree, the paper hand could respond, moving in sync with the embrace. A proximity sensor could make this possible, allowing the hand to subtly shift as if the tree were acknowledging the hug.

That said, this project is fun—but also, possibly, a little unsettling. If this were experienced in real life, would it actually help build a better emotional connection, or would it just be scary—an eerie anthropomorphized tree looming outside? There must be a more clever way to approach this. Is it a matter of scale? The narrative? The interaction itself?

③ Cozy Set-up?

After a roundtable discussion with my peers, someone suggested making the experience feel cozy and user-friendly—perhaps designing the interaction to feel softer, more inviting. But after sketching it out, I realized that leaning too much into coziness could dilute the speculative edge of the project.

I’m not trying to propose that every tree should be fitted with a prosthetic limb—this isn’t an eco-tech solution. It’s a way to imagine a scenario where sensors allow trees to reach out, to extend their ‘hands’ in communication with us. It’s about making the invisible, visible.

④ A Diamora Set-Up?

The next illustration thought about the logistical issue that might arise from hosting an experience outdoor. To tackle this, , I visualise a diorama-like version of the previous visualisation. I bring the scale down to a miniature tree (Bonsai Tree) and a (tinier) Friendly Hand that reacts to sound sensors.

Similarly, I visualise this set-up to aid in imagination and further allow the technological object to be accessed outside of a singular workshop - making it more accessible for more people.