Conditions of Appearance is an interactive design project that examines how digital information appears, disappears and demands attention in contemporary media culture. The work consists of two interactive objects, DICE Lamp and NET Compass, which translate the unstable qualities of online information into bodily, material and ritualised experiences.

In everyday digital consumption, news of war and disaster, short videos, memes and personal messages are flattened onto the same screen. They arrive through the same gestures of scrolling and swiping, with almost the same visual weight. Everything is scrollable. Everything is replaceable. The project asks what kind of attention digital information deserves, and what is lost when everything arrives without effort.
The work is framed through digital mono no aware, drawing on the Japanese aesthetic concept of mono no aware: a sensitivity to impermanence, and the idea that things move us precisely because they do not last. In the context of digital media, a headline, a short video or a breaking news image may appear for a few seconds before being buried by the next piece of content. It is not deleted; it is displaced and forgotten.

The project asks, with deliberate absurdity:

What if we mourned a disappearing headline the way we mourn a falling blossom? If not everything on our screens deserves that kind of attention, then what does? When everything arrives at the same speed, through the same feed, with the same swipe, how do we tell the difference?

NET Compass turns live online news into direction, distance and pressure. The device connects in real time to a news API, fetching current headlines and mapping the reported location of each event in relation to the user’s physical position. Rather than presenting news as text on a flat screen, it translates information into compass bearings, vertical tilt and pressure-based interaction.

To browse the news, the user faces the direction where an event is happening or has happened. Horizontal rotation searches by bearing. Vertical tilt adjusts distance: pointing downwards retrieves local news, while lifting the device upwards expands towards more distant events. From London, for example, a conflict in northern Ukraine would register as roughly east-northeast, with the device tilted upwards to indicate a more distant event. Place names are removed at the initial point of encounter, so the user cannot recognise a location through text alone. They rely instead on orientation and bodily awareness. To read more, the user squeezes the handle while holding the device steady. A light grip reveals slow, fragmented text. A stronger grip reveals more detail and accelerates the display. A slight change in direction brings up another story, and turning back may not recover the previous one. The information does not arrive for free; it is earned through the effort of the body.

DICE Lamp replaces the certainty of a light switch with chance. A lamp is usually one of the simplest forms of everyday control: press a switch, and the light turns on. In this work, pressing the button triggers a digital dice animation on a small OLED display. The lamp only illuminates when the dice lands on six. The familiar binary logic of on/off is interrupted. Nothing is guaranteed, not even the act of turning on a light.

The material language of both objects reinforces the conceptual framework. Selected surfaces are copper electroformed and oxidised, producing a finish that changes through air, time and touch. The copper carries marks of ageing, handling and contact, creating a deliberate contrast with the smooth, frictionless design language of contemporary electronics. The forms reference the withered lotus and scholar’s rocks, motifs associated in East Asian art with impermanence, the passage of time and mono no aware.

Together, the two objects challenge the assumption that interaction should always be seamless and effortless. One asks what it means for something to appear at all. The other asks what it takes to stay with what appears. The project proposes that digital information, however brief and virtual, can still carry weight. It asks how we might begin to distinguish between what simply passes through us and what demands that we stay, and what conditions of encounter might allow us to make that distinction for ourselves.

NET Compass is a networked interactive device that connects to a live news API over WiFi. On startup, the ESP32 microcontroller establishes a WiFi connection and queries the API at regular intervals, receiving JSON data containing headlines, descriptions and geographic coordinates of current events. The firmware calculates the compass bearing from the user’s location to each event and matches the closest result to the direction the user is physically facing. Tilt angle, read from the MPU6050 gyroscope, determines the geographic search radius — a downward angle retrieves local events, while an upward angle expands to national and global scale. Grip pressure on the FSR sensor controls the character-by-character reveal speed of the displayed text on the OLED screen. DICE Lamp uses a microcontroller to generate a random result each time the button is pressed. The result is displayed as an animated dice sequence on a small OLED screen. The internal LED is activated only when the result is six. All other results leave the lamp dark, and the interaction resets for another attempt. The main structures of both objects were produced using FDM 3D printing in PLA. The DICE Lamp shade was printed in PETG for its translucency.

Conditions of Appearance combines physical computing, embedded electronics, real-time networked data, 3D printing and material experimentation. Both objects were developed as fully functional interactive prototypes.

Project Page | UAL MAID | Instagram