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Uncommon Senses

Project Information

Interaction Design Degree Project 2025 Umeå Institute of Design

Role

Individual Project

Internal Mentors

Christoffel Kuenen, Ambra Trotto

External Mentors

Pamela Gill-Salas, Karey Helms, Luca Bottoni

How might we create play-based interventions that enable children to experience nature as a co-creator?

To reimagine nature— not as something to observed or explained, but to be lived, shaped, and negotiated through movement, perception, and multisensory play?

Uncommon Senses" presents a solution addressing the critical issue of nature disconnection in childhood in our increasingly urbanised and digitally saturated world1. 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. It offers a novel approach to children's engagement with nature by introducing a modular system of sensor-based play-things designed to disrupt habitual ways of sensing and create conditions to sense nature differently, moving beyond traditional educational products that teach facts or simulate animal senses