Overview
What if the ecosystem could ask for help — and we could actually respond? Nexus starts from a simple but unsettling observation: the natural world communicates constantly, in chemical languages we can’t perceive. Climate change is making those signals more urgent. But we’re not listening, partly because we don’t know how.
Nexus is an interactive installation set in the year 2150, imagining a future where humans and non-human entities have learned to communicate through chemistry. A visitor kneels before the device, breathes into it, and donates their biological chemicals to a collective effort to fight rising temperatures — initiated by bacteria, translated by AI, completed by mammals. The installation makes the invisible tangible, and the interconnectedness of all living things felt rather than merely understood.
I was central to the concept and idea generation phase — the speculative premise of inter-species chemical communication emerged from our early research sessions, which I actively shaped. On the technical side, Duru and I led the TouchDesigner and Arduino work, building the interactive and responsive layer of the installation. The physical object itself was crafted by Erika, Fabio, and Yaren. We all contributed to setting up the exhibition space and running the testing sessions. I also took the lead on writing a short narrative to explain the concept to visitors during the exhibition — translating a complex speculative idea into something immediate and accessible.
- TouchDesigner
- Arduino
- Figma
- Illustrator / Photoshop
- Premiere Pro
- Claude LLM
Design process
The following is the graph showing the process we followed to get to our final result.
Research
We started with a field research, by visiting La Goccia forest, trying to notice and attune to the entities of that natural environment, to do so we took pictures and made sketches.
From this field trip we identified the following five entities as our core elements for our project:
Role playing
To understand the connections within these entities, we did roleplaying, where each designer embodied one entity and asked each other questions to better understand their points of view.
Ideation
We used an AI LLM tool, Claude, and asked it to act as Fungi and then Bacteria. We realized that they are communicating in a language composed of chemical compounds. This became our main inspiration behind creating Nexus.
Nexus
After using AI as a speculative partner, we discovered the imperceptible languages of different beings, and created Nexus, a chemical collection and distribution hub in the year 2150.
Due to the rising temperatures caused by the climate change, Bacteria calls for help and initiates this process. The AI translates bacteria’s language and invites mammals to contribute their chemicals to fight against the unbearable heat together. To illustrate our vision, we generated an image using Microsoft Designer and Adobe Photoshop.
Prototyping
We built Nexus using Christmas ornaments and modelling clay, then added polystyrene balls inside, which floats when a user breathes into it.
Inspired by the rituals around the world, we imagined an interaction where the user kneels in order to interact with Nexus. To do so, created a base of Nexus, where the chemical collector is placed on. We wanted to use different mammals’ handprints to direct users to place their hands on to make the interaction intuitive.
Once the users are kneeled, the narrative AI asks users to breathe into Nexus. To detect the breath, we used a sound sensor and Arduino, and connected it to Touchdesigner, in order to enable the responsivity and interactivity.
Through the interaction, the user donates their chemicals by breathing into the chemical collector. They can see their contribution through the projections on the walls and the ground simultaneously. To create these projections, we used Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Adobe Premiere Pro.
Music
For increasing immersivity of the exhibition, we created the following ambient soundtrack using FL Studio app:
Demo exhibition
Nexus was showcased at the Bovisa Campus of Politecnico di Milano, where we got feedback from design students and faculty.
Reflection
Nexus was the most conceptually ambitious project I’ve worked on, and the one that pushed me furthest outside my comfort zone — both technically and intellectually. Working in TouchDesigner and Arduino to build a responsive, sensor-driven installation was genuinely new territory for me, and getting the breath detection to reliably trigger the projections required a lot of iteration that never showed up in the final piece. That invisibility is, I think, part of what good interaction design does: the technology disappears so the experience can speak.
Writing the visitor narrative was unexpectedly one of the most valuable parts of the project for me. Distilling a speculative concept rooted in microbiology, climate science, and more-than-human design into a paragraph that a stranger could understand in 30 seconds forced me to be ruthless about what actually mattered. It also reminded me that design communication — the ability to make complex ideas feel accessible — is as much a design skill as any tool or method.
The project left me with a lasting interest in design that takes non-human perspectives seriously. More-than-human design isn’t just an academic framework — it’s a genuinely different way of asking “who is this for?” and I find that question more interesting every time I return to it.
Credits
Course: Digital Design Studio (part of MSc in Digital & Interaction Design at Politecnico di Milano)
Professors: Elisa Giaccardi, Francesco Vergani
Team: Alessandra Sgariglia, Duru Erdem, Erika Caffo, Fabio Sannino, Yaren Yavuz
Special thanks to: Matteo Lo Valvo