FeltSense

FeltSense is a interactive installation that explores whether speculative storytelling through gesture, sound, and visuals can preserve the emotional and cultural meaning lost when words are translated across languages.

Project Video

Abstract

When words travel between languages, something is inevitably lost. A dictionary can translate the Danish word Hygge as "cosiness," but it cannot convey the shared silence, or the feeling of being held by the people around you. This gap between what a word means in its original cultural context and what survives translation, is not just a linguistic problem but semantic loss. It is a design problem that affects every digital interface localized for global audiences.FeltSense is an interactive, web-based installation that investigates whether speculative storytelling can preserve the emotional and cultural meaning that literal translation drops. The project takes three untranslatable words from three distinct cultures and translates them not into English definitions, but into embodied, multisensory experiences.The installation presents each word in two contrasting modes. The first offers a flat, dictionary style translation. The second immerses the visitor in a speculative scene built from particle systems, carefully designed color palettes, spatial soundscapes, and gesture based interaction. The project is grounded in a literature review spanning storytelling in UX design, translation and transcreation theory, speculative design (drawing on Dunne and Raby), cultural heritage storytelling (including the EMOTIVE project and Indigenous digital storytelling), and cross cultural emotional measurement. Semi-structured interviews with multilingual participants conducted during the research phase confirmed that narrative reinterpretations were perceived as more emotionally vivid, culturally authentic, and memorable than literal translations. Built using particle system architecture with trail buffers, Perlin noise flow fields, and parallax depth, FeltSense runs entirely in the browser. Every design parameter such as the particle behavior, color, sound, gesture mapping, transition pacing, and breath cues is driven by the emotional profile of the word it represents.

FeltSense demonstrates that speculative storytelling can function as a genuine alternative to translation in interface design, bridging cultural meaning not through words, but through feeling.

Photos