Our brief was to translate a message from one person, object, or place to another. We started with a story from my teammate Sindhu, who missed having tea with her mom every day. That simple daily ritual sparked a big question: how can we send a sense of presence across distance?

We started by experimenting with simple indicators of presence. One idea was to light up the other person’s tea set when you made tea—similar to The Good Night Lamp by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. For our project, the "present/not present" binary felt a little too simplistic. We wanted to add a sense of personalization.

On the other end of the spectrum, we considered using voice messages, but during bodystorming sessions, we quickly realized that speaking into your teacup felt awkward and performative. It pulled us out of the quiet rhythm of tea-making. We wanted a form of expression that felt more ambient—something that felt personal, but could be woven into the ritual itself.

We returned to the act of making tea and began to prototype. We acted out the full tea ritual to identify moments where different interactions felt most natural. Could the message begin with pouring? Stirring? Drinking? These physical rehearsals helped us zero in on stirring as a moment of quiet focus and intention—just expressive enough to hold a message, but subtle enough to stay true to the ritual.

We designed a pair of connected tea platforms, each with a base and a spoon. Stirring your tea generates a custom audio composition in real time—your motion becomes melody. When the stirring stops and the spoon is placed down, the composition is sent.

To make the sound feel as natural as the gesture, I used Processing and MIDI to translate spoon movement into music. An accelerometer and gyroscope inside the spoon capture the movement and rotation of stirring. That data flows into Processing, which maps it to MIDI notes, triggering a singing bowl tone we pulled from GarageBand.

We chose the singing bowl specifically for its resonance with the act of tea-making—circular, calming, and meditative.

Once the musical message is recorded and the spoon is placed down, a small light turns on on the recipient’s tea set. It’s a quiet cue: something was stirred, and something is waiting. When they pour their own tea, the audio plays. This moment of interaction was inspired by Durrell Bishop’s Marble Answering Machine, which showed us how physical gestures could embody and hold messages in a more human way.