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Uncommon Senses
Project Information
Interaction Design Degree Project 2025 Umeå Institute of Design
Main Focus
Physical Interaction Design and Prototyping
Internal Mentors
Christoffel Kuenen, Ambra Trotto
External Mentors
Pamela Gill-Salas, Karey Helms, Luca Bottoni
Uncommon Senses" presents a solution addressing the critical issue of nature disconnection in childhood in our increasingly urbanised and digitally saturated world. This project directly responds to a growing cultural demand for "tactile, finite, and real" experiences, as parents actively seek "richer, embodied alternatives" to screens for their children.
Through sensor-based artifacts that disrupt perception, this project creates moments of surprise, ambiguity, and curiosity. Instead of teaching facts, it invites children to invent their own stories, rituals, and games with nature.
Children’s relationship with nature is shrinking. Many grow up in urban environments where access to wild spaces is limited, and even when they are outdoors, nature is often treated as a backdrop rather than an active presence. Educational approaches tend to reinforce this: nature is explained, categorized, or measured, but rarely experienced as something alive and participatory.
At the same time, children are surrounded by digital technologies that are highly directive and closed. Most devices are built to deliver predictable outcomes—press a button, get a result. This leaves little room for the ambiguity, surprise, and imagination that spark genuine curiosity.
The project resulted in an 80-page thesis on children’s sensory engagement with nature, approached from an interaction design perspective. It documents the research, the prototyping journey, and the toolkit of artifacts developed through the process.
Writing the thesis was not just a degree requirement — it became a way to critically reflect on my practice as a designer. Through it, I gained confidence in leading a full project cycle independently: from framing questions and conducting fieldwork to developing concepts and testing them in the real world.
Challenges & Opportunities
Challenges & Opportunities
Project Outcome
A collection of playful, ambiguous tools—like a glove that hums when it touches the ground, goggles that shift shadows, and sound devices that soften voices. Tested with children in Sweden and India, these artifacts inspired them to invent new ways of relating to their surroundings—sometimes holding tools to their bellies to “listen” to their stomachs, or using them to sense plants in ways they hadn’t noticed before.
Design Outcome
MFA Interaction Design
Degree Project Report
Anjuli Acharya
Uncommon Senses
Masters Thesis in Interaction Design
These tensions revealed an opportunity: by introducing simple, sensor-based interventions that disrupt perception, children could encounter nature in new and unexpected ways. Instead of being told what a tree is, they could invent their own ways of sensing it. Instead of receiving answers, they could form questions. Making space for this kind of exploration opens up not only a richer relationship with nature, but also more equitable ways of engaging with technology—where children become co-creators, not just passive users.
At the heart of this project are the small, everyday encounters children have with the more-than-human world—moments of touching soil, noticing insects, or offering a flower to a friend. These fleeting gestures may seem simple, but they reveal how children build relationships through play: embodied, improvised, and imaginative.
The research took place in two contrasting contexts—Pune (India) and Umeå (Sweden). Each setting shaped the forms of play, the kinds of multispecies encounters, and the social dynamics around how children engaged with nature. Rather than smoothing over these differences, the project treated them as generative, showing how ecological awareness is always local, layered, and situated.
At the heart of this project are the small, everyday encounters children have with the more-than-human world—moments of touching soil, noticing insects, or offering a flower to a friend. These fleeting gestures may seem simple, but they reveal how children build relationships through play: embodied, improvised, and imaginative.
The research took place in two contrasting contexts—Pune (India) and Umeå (Sweden). Each setting shaped the forms of play, the kinds of multispecies encounters, and the social dynamics around how children engaged with nature. Rather than smoothing over these differences, the project treated them as generative, showing how ecological awareness is always local, layered, and situated.
Process
infrastructure
peers
care
curiosity
intra-actions
Parents
In one activity, children became “animal detectives,” using sticks and sketchbooks to look for signs of life. Their play slowed down, attention sharpened, and they began debating clues and inventing backstories.
The insight: tools that reframe exploration can shift children from consuming information to noticing and questioning.
After completing the initial research phase, I moved into a more generative mode. This part of the process was focused on exploring ideas through play, material experimentation, and interaction with children. I developed a series of low-fidelity prototypes that responded to insights from my fieldwork—particularly around how children perceive, speculate, and engage with non-human life.
These early prototypes were not meant to solve problems, but to test interactions, spark curiosity, and observe behavior. I shared them with children in different settings—parks, homes, and schools—to see how they responded, what they ignored, and how they reinterpreted the tools.
Uncommon Senses explores how interaction design can support children in sensing the world differently. The project resulted in a set of simple, physical artifacts for outdoor play—tools that introduce gentle perceptual shifts inspired by more-than-human ways of knowing.
Instead of presenting nature as something to be observed or explained, the artifacts frame interaction as shared sensing. By subtly disrupting tactile, visual, and auditory perception, they encourage children to slow down, notice, and invent their own meanings.
When I began, my brief was straightforward: explore how interaction design might help children build more meaningful relationships with the more-than-human world. I imagined tools that would slow children down, guide their attention, and help them “learn about nature” through cues or storytelling.
But early interactions challenged that logic.
The most interesting moments weren’t when children followed a prompt, but when they misread, reinterpreted, or invented something entirely new. It became clear that the goal wasn’t to deliver knowledge, but to gently disturb familiar ways of sensing—shifting how things feel, sound, or appear.
That path was not easy. Much of the process felt uncertain, even fragile. At times the project risked collapsing into education if too structured, or dissolving into nothing if too open. I kept asking myself: is this playful enough, serious enough, speculative enough? Should I just make a defined toolkit? Something clear, polished, pointable?
In the end, I chose not to resolve that tension but to stay with it. Ambiguity became the strength of the work. Designing here meant offering just enough to begin, and then stepping back. The real design was in shaping the edges of an experience I could never fully control.
This project taught me to see design as scaffolding rather than solutions. Moving forward, I want my practice to embrace this position: designing for uncertainty, supporting play, and creating the conditions for new relationships to emerge.
The concept is not didactic. It does not instruct or guide. It responds—softly—through vibrations, distortions, or altered feedback. In doing so, it opens space for children to experiment, speculate, and relate to their environments in new ways.
The result is a design proposition: what if children could engage with nature not by learning facts, but by tuning in and experiencing the world differently? Uncommon Senses shows that by shifting perception rather than delivering answers, interaction design can foster curiosity, play, and ecological imagination.
Uncommon Senses is not about delivering knowledge or teaching children how to see nature. It is about creating conditions where small disruptions spark new ways of noticing.
The testing sessions showed that children don’t wait for instructions—they invent their own rules, stories, and meanings. A prompt card turned into a horizon marker. A vibration tool became “music you can feel.” A smell kit became a guessing game. The artifacts worked not by directing play, but by leaving space for interpretation.
This is the core proposition: interaction design can support ecological awareness not through explanation, but through ambiguity, openness, and embodied curiosity. By slowing perception just enough to make the ordinary feel unfamiliar, Uncommon Senses opens up room for speculation, care, and new rituals of play.
I also tested speculative prototypes—bee-vision goggles that blurred clarity, or an “animal communicator” that let children role-play conversations with simulated species. These sparked ethical reasoning, curiosity, and embodied experiments, showing that disruption and ambiguity can deepen engagement more than direct instruction.
Sensory & Perceptual Disruption
Play as the ground of inquiry and relation
Interaction as Attunement
Negotiation
Speculative & Ethical World-Building
Altering default sensory modes
Co-regulation between body, tool, and environment
Nature as co-player, not content
Role-play as relational provocation
Disrupting recognition-based interactions
Movement as a form of communication
Child becomes part of the system
Care as emergent action, not instruction
Inviting slowness, detours, friction
Waiting and tuning in
Concept Develpment
Concept Delivery
Reflections
Design for Perceptual Shift
Create tools that unsettle sensory expectations and invite new ways of noticing.
Slowness
Friction
Abstraction
Center Relationality
Foster presence, patience, and co-regulation rather than feedback or instruction.
Environmental responsiveness
Presence
Emergent rules
Decision- making
Improvised Negotiation
Experiences that allow children to negotiate space, agency, and boundaries
Speculation Through Play
Use play to support ethical and imaginative shifts across species boundaries.
Opening Spaces
Stories
Concept
Attunement with nature through sensory shifts in play
Context
Outdoor natural or semi-natural spaces where children already play
Sensorial play-things that scaffold open-ended, relational engagement
Use embodied, sensory disruption as a design method, inspired by animals
Scope
Approach
designing the mood and material of an encounter
interaction to support relationships between people, objects, and environment
Design as a scaffold for emergent behaviour
Resisting the dominant logic of sensors to optimise data
Across contexts, the consistent finding was that children don’t simply use tools as given—they reconfigure them. For design, this means creating artifacts that act as catalysts rather than answers.