The Love Letter


Interactive Installation | Speculative Design | Storytelling
Individual Project (Dec. 2024 - Mar. 2025)

A set of interactive exhibitory designs that speculate and reflect on a future where all human communication is replaced by algorithms that deliver meanings in a perfect and accurate way. 

There are two parts of the exhibition:

One follows the Resistance—a movement that values imperfection, ambiguity, and the raw, fleeting expressions of human connection.

The other follows the path of the Government, where communication is optimised, misunderstandings are erased, and emotions are distilled into perfect clarity.

Both offer a form of love.
Both leave behind traces of meaning.




“Computers are becoming invisible. They shrink and hide. They lurk under the skin and dissolve in the cloud. We observe the process like an eclipse of the sun, partly scared, partly overwhelmed. We divide into camps and fight about the advantages and dangers of the ubiquitous. But whatever side we take—we do acknowledge the significance of the moment.”

- Turing Complete User (Olia Lialina, 2021)


(Sound Available)


Rationale



Based on the collected workshop outcomes:


 Love Letter as a symbol - A representation of ambiguity and complex codes in human communication


Love Letter Collection




Brainstorm & Insights


I realised that bubbles can express the ambiguity and imperfection of a love letter because of their fragility and constant change. The gentle, trivial touches on paper and pen when writing the letter can serve as the input. In contrast, the digital output should be clean, automated and accurate. The design needs to highlight this tension between the physical and the digital to provoke reflection and debate.


Audience Journey Flow





Development and Fabrication


The 
Government


VR Video (made in Blender)
Each of the glass balls contains an object that represents a shared memory between a couple, for example, a pot of flowers they plant together. In this VR video, the user would see a report generated that measures and rates the experiences and feelings, and the report will be sent to the receiver.

The scene is designed to represent logical, clear and perfection.




The design utilises model properties from from Marble Run Kit by Alan Luk


The Resistance








Coloured Soup Water

The colour palette is derived from the love letter interviews that people used to communicate their feelings.



User Testing



Example of sound feedback when ‘writing’ the love letter:




Computation


Circuit
PCB

Code



Construction





Visitor Instruction Booklet










Final Exhibition


Background Audio:






Example of Letters




Which one would you choose?


Citation


dpt (2024) MarbleRunKit. Available at: https://github.com/dpt/MarbleRunKit (Accessed: 28 November 2024).

Lialina, O. (2021) Turing Complete User: Resisting Alienation in Human Computer Interaction. Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net. doi:10.11588/arthistoricum.972

Pourjafarian, N., Withana, A., Paradiso, J.A. and Steimle, J., 2019. Multi-Touch Kit: A do-it-yourself technique for capacitive multi-touch sensing using a commodity microcontroller. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’19). New York: Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 1071–1083. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3332165.3347895

Previous