Deep Communication

In the Responsive Environments course, we designed a communication system to translate complex, hard-to-describe personal experiences—ranging from body-scale sensations to planetary-scale events—into shared experiences that build empathy. We focused on communication barriers around climate change, from linguistic gaps to the difficulty of grasping spatial scales, such as the relationship between the human body and atmospheric clouds during cyclonic events. The system used wearable devices to capture a storyteller’s speech and heart rate while they narrated an experience. This data was processed in real time and converted into spatial images using text-to-image generative AI. The result is a storytelling medium where spoken narratives are paired with AI-generated visuals, enabling listeners to “see” and better understand the storyteller’s climatic experience. By turning linguistic stories into spatial ones, the system transforms abstract climate events into vivid, shareable imaginaries.