Objects with Life

Portia Chiu

A quick recap from last semester...

My thesis started from looking into how people with ADHD often lose their belongings and spend lots of time looking for them.

This made me wonder,
Instead of us looking for the objects, what if they seek our attention?

My hypothesis:
When a static object gains motion, it becomes harder to ignore, and the human–object relationship changes.

This is the mug that I made to test the hypothesis.

_{People immediately stopped seeing it as just a mug.}
^{They became curious and tried to understand what it was doing.}

I realized that :
motion doesn’t just attract attention, it creates a sense of presence.

I then applied this idea to a more practical scenario, inspired by ADHD struggles like time blindness and hyperfocus.

struggle to sense the passage of time or to estimate how long a task will take (Gushiken et al., 2022)
become so deeply absorbed in a task that everything else fades into the background (Oroian, Nechita & Szalontay, 2025)

lamp that communicates through light and movements

It checks whether you’ve actually moved on, and gently nudges you with different movements until you do.

Through user testing, I realized that people without ADHD were very interested in my moving lamp.
Everyone interpreted the movement differently and had different ideas of what the object could be for if they owned it.
For instance, one person wanted the lamp by their bed, slowly dimming as it gets closer to bedtime.

This is the lamp I designed at the end of the Fall Semester.

I decided to pivot slightly.
Instead of solving ADHD-specific problems,
I want to explore how movement can shape human–object relationships more broadly.

Looking into body doubling, as I didn’t get to explore much last semester.

leveraging another person’s social presence to increase focus, motivation, and sustained engagement in tasks (Ara er al. 2025)

Can an object create a sense of presence and become a kind of body-doubling companion?

I decided to approach this by introducing movement that feels more organic and unpredictable,
to create something that behaves more like a living organism.

After some research, I began exploring continuum robotics.

I decided to use springs as the main component.

Originally, I wanted the structure to stand on the desk, but the head of the lamp is too heavy for it to support.

I learned that if I add more structure to support the weight, I gain stability, but I lose fluidity.

Alternatively, I could make it a hanging structure.
This way, I wouldn’t have to fight against gravity, and it could potentially achieve the more fluid and organic movement I was aiming for.

So I conducted interviews about lighting in people’s homes.
Some people strongly avoid overhead lighting and prefer multiple ambient light sources, while others prefer more direct and functional lighting depending on the space.

This led to a lot of questions, and the lamp started to have some identity crisis...

- Should it stand, or should it hang?

- If it hangs, is it still a desk lamp? A standing object feels more grounded and task-oriented.

- If it’s no longer a desk lamp, is it a main light source, or just ambient lighting?

Each option creates a completely different interaction and relationship with the user.

Instead of choosing one direction, I decided to create a hybrid.

This allows me to explore both standing and hanging conditions, and test how movement, position, and form together create different types of presence and relationships.

Moving forward,

- develop more form variations and CMF

- figure out how to integrate the mechanisms into a single motorized prototype * backup plan: create multiple prototypes, each demonstrating different aspects of movement and interaction.

- user testing: understand what types of movement are most effective in creating a sense of companionship

- create a video showing how these behaviors would exist in the intended context and scenario

For the exhibition,

Ideally, both the lamp and the mug will be interactive.

The book will flip its pages as different interactions are triggered, explaining what is happening.

Sometimes I have magic powers, and sometimes I’m just very delusional...

If I’m not able to get the objects fully working for the exhibition, they will still be presented as beautiful physical forms,
and the interaction will be communicated through the video and the book.

My goal is for people to not just look at the objects, but to imagine what it feels like to live with them.