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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?
About
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
Uncommon Senses explores how interaction design can support children’s natural curiosity in nature — not by teaching them what to look for, but by creating tools that help them notice what they might otherwise miss.
The project resulted in an open-source toolkit of low-tech, sensor-based artifacts that gently disrupt perception. A glove that hums when pressed to the soil, goggles that blur shadows, or a sound tool that softens human voices — each artifact introduces subtle feedback that opens space for curiosity, interpretation, and shared play.
Rather than delivering information or guiding toward a “correct” answer, these tools act as perceptual companions. They invite negotiation, storytelling, and collaboration between children, their peers, and their environment.
Tested in Sweden and India with children aged 5–7, Uncommon Senses demonstrated that ambiguity and disruption can be powerful design materials. Children invented their own games, stories, and rituals with the tools, showing that meaning emerges most strongly when design steps back and leaves room for imagination.
Uncommon Senses is not a finished product but a living system of invitations — designed to be remixed, adapted, and reinterpreted by educators, designers, and communities around the world.
Process
1. Research & Fieldwork
I began with ethnographic observations of children (ages 5–7) in Sweden, India, and the Netherlands. By adopting a “least-adult” role, I watched how children interacted with plants, soil, insects, and animals during unstructured play. These moments revealed that curiosity often emerges through touch, movement, mimicry, and improvisation—not instruction.
Key insight: Children don’t need to be told how to be curious. They need conditions that leave space for it.
2. Playshops & Speculative Prompts
I ran playful “playshops” using props and speculative prompts to explore how children respond to ambiguity. For example, bee-vision goggles blurred their sight, and roleplay like “what if you were a turtle?” encouraged embodied imagination. These sessions highlighted how children reinterpret cues in surprising, relational ways.
3. Early Prototyping
I built low-fidelity prototypes with sensors and everyday materials to test how subtle sensory disruptions might shape play. These included a soil “whisperer,” shadow tracers, and sound filters. Prototyping revealed a delicate balance: too much clarity collapsed into instruction, too little left the artifacts ignored.
4. Refinement Through Iteration
Testing with children showed that minimal, ambiguous feedback—like a faint vibration—was often enough to spark entire narratives. One child, for instance, built a “home for Freddy the Frog” after feeling the glove hum in soil. These interactions reframed the prototypes not as teaching tools but as relational prompts.
5. The Toolkit
The final outcome became an open-source toolkit of sensor-based artifacts, designed not to guide but to invite. Each artifact disrupts familiar ways of sensing just enough to encourage children to slow down, negotiate meaning with others, and co-create stories with their environment.
Result
The result of Uncommon Senses is an open-source toolkit of sensor-based play artifacts that shift how children relate to their environments. Rather than teaching facts or guiding toward fixed outcomes, the toolkit creates subtle disruptions in perception — inviting children to notice differently, interpret together, and turn those interpretations into play.
Through real-world testing in Sweden and India, the prototypes consistently sparked child-led improvisation and social collaboration. A glove that hummed in the soil became part of a story about “Freddy the Frog’s home.” Goggles that blurred shadows turned into a game of stillness: “You can only see animals if you stop moving.” A smell capsule without labels turned into a guessing game with a parent: “It’s green and small.”
These responses showed that the toolkit functions not as teaching devices, but as relational prompts — tools that open space for negotiation, storytelling, and shared sensing.
At its core, Uncommon Senses demonstrates how interaction design can use sensors not to optimize or instruct, but to foster curiosity, attentiveness, and collaborative meaning-making. The “result” is therefore not only a set of objects, but a design framework for embodied, playful learning with nature.
If you would like to know more, read my thesis report here !