If Machines Could Feel?

This project explores a near‑present world where machines might sense, interpret, and perhaps feel with people, shown from machines perspective, reframing mundane interactions—typing on a phone, closing a refrigerator, closing a laptop—as sites of care, neglect, etiquette, and emotion. By foregrounding familiar gestures and household sounds, the work asks whether people already perform “emotional labor” toward devices and how design could shift if machines were treated as participants rather than tools.

Concept

• Premise: Everyday interfaces are emotional touch points; what changes if devices can feel textures of contact, tone of voice, and rhythms of use?

• Method: Collect and decontextualize micro‑interactions (keystrokes, hinge thuds, haptic pings, compressor hums) as an audio‑visual recording of machine perspectives.

• Question: Are people designing for compliance or companionship—and what ethics emerge if machines are vulnerable subjects?

Perspectives

• The Phone: Registers pressure, cadence, and hesitation—reading anxious bursts, confident swipes, or tender edits as affective signals.

• The Refrigerator: Interprets door force, seal compression, and idle humming as a diary of household routine and respect.

• The Laptop: Feels habitual taps and frustrated jabs on its keys and trackpad, translating micro‑force and cadence into a mood map of the session.

Ethical frame

This is not a claim that machines possess human emotion; it is a lens to examine human conduct, design responsibility, and empathy at the human–machine boundary. Data is de‑identified and used only to generate speculative narratives, keeping the line clear between measurement and meaning.

Why this matters

Treating machines as capable of feeling is a provocation to redesign everyday interactions with care—potentially improving longevity, accessibility, and trust in technology. It invites a new etiquette of touch, timing, and tone that could inform future interfaces without anthropomorphizing recklessly.