Not Yet Sayable: Latent Homes

The project developed through two terms of prototyping and two participatory workshops, exploring how personal reflection could become a collective experience.

Early experiments connected handwritten responses, camera-based capture, interactive interfaces, and spatial visualisation. Rather than treating these as separate components, the design process explored how they could form a continuous experience of participation.

Particular attention was given to the sequence of questions, the physical arrangement of the writing station, and the opportunity to encounter other participants' responses. These experiments helped shift the focus from simply collecting contributions to creating conditions for reflection, expression, and dialogue.

The installation is organised into two connected levels: Articulation and World Formation.

Articulation creates space for individual reflection, inviting participants to express memories, present circumstances, and imagined futures. World Formation gives these contributions a shared spatial form, allowing them to accumulate and develop relationships with the experiences of others.

Together, the two levels connect a personal act of imagining with a collective environment. The interaction is designed as an evolving process, moving from individual expression to shared interpretation and collective imagination.

Participants write by hand in response to system-provided prompts about home, drawing on memories, present circumstances and things they wish could exist. Home provides a familiar starting point for reflection and imagination.

The writing station and prompts make room for contributions that may not yet be easy to put into words. Writing gives participants time to stay with a thought and give it a form that can be shared. The purpose is to open an opportunity for imagination through everyday experience.

The system gives participants prompts and captures their handwritten responses through a camera. As they contribute, handwriting is recognised and analysed in real time, with feedback appearing alongside the written material.

Feedback and archiving happen within the same live process. The response is recorded and organised while the participant is still engaging with the installation, connecting a personal act of writing to the growing shared material of World Formation.

Written contributions are interpreted and organised with support from AI, then accumulated in a shared spatial visualisation. Participants' expressions become data that can be encountered together.

The growing world makes words, memories and relationships visible. As new contributions are added, the visualisation gives people a way to read experiences beyond their own and return to their own responses in relation to others. This is how the material gathered through participation is offered back to the community.

The visualisation returns to the people around it. Visitors can read one another's responses and enter conversations through this shared material. Participation continues through looking, reading and exchanging ideas as well as writing.

Experience design brings these moments together. The questions, interface and physical setting create an opportunity to imagine, while the visualisation allows the resulting traces to circulate among people. Community is where these traces are encountered and interpreted again.