Brief: Design a way to make brain activity responding to aesthetic experiences visible, tangible, or interactive.
Designers: Stav, Ellen, Dahoon, Grania, Chen Chen, Jiayi, Izzy, Sakshi, Sarthak, Dylan, Jin
Mini Group Designers: Dahoon, Grania, Chen Chen, Jin
In the first week, we began with the Invisible Box Test as a generative step to explore non-visual sensory experience. In this test, participants were asked to place their hands into a sealed box without any visual access and interact with a series of materials using only their sense of touch.
(Fig. i) Invisible Box Test by Micro Group(2025)
Our initial focus was primarily on participants' verbal feedback. However, I observed that the brain’s response to tactile stimuli was also reflected through eye movements. This led me to attempt a quantitative analysis of participants’ eye behavior in relation to their tactile reactions, in an effort to establish potential correlations. Although the limited sample size prevents any statistically significant conclusions, several emerging patterns were observed across individual cases.
For instance, pleasant or neutral emotions were often accompanied by sustained forward gaze and steady eye movement, occasionally including smooth scanning, with touch durations ranging from approximately 15 to 37 seconds. In contrast, unpleasant emotions were more frequently associated with squinting, frequent side glances, and micro eye tremors, with touch durations typically concentrated within the 5 to 10 second range, often followed by quick withdrawal.
(Fig. i) Invisible Box Test Analysis by Micro Group(2025)
Upon reflection, I realized that the categorization of emotional responses into pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant lacked a clear baseline. This makes the classification prone to ambiguity and subjectivity, especially in the case of the “neutral” category, which remained poorly defined. Moreover, the small sample size and considerable individual variation limited the strength of the observed trends.