Touch of Moss

Overview

It started with a small fact: moss is one of the oldest plants on Earth

That quiet detail set the direction for the entire project. My collaborator Alua and I created Touch of Moss — an interactive multisensory installation built around how moss quietly shapes its surroundings. It cools and stabilizes its environment, communicates chemically, and even makes tiny physical sounds. That subtlety and constancy shaped our approach to the interaction design — we wanted it to feel soft and responsive, never abrupt.

With both of us coming from a UX background, our main focus was making the garden feel intuitive, welcoming, and worth lingering at. Through rounds of playtesting and observing how people approached the piece, we iterated constantly — placing cushions so visitors would naturally kneel rather than step on it, 3D-printing base structures to give the moss varying heights, and tuning the LED animations and sound to respond slowly and organically.

Behind the softness was a lot of physical-computing trial and error. The garden sits on the ground, with soft moss layered over hidden LEDs — when someone reaches down and touches it, lights ripple outward in slow, heartbeat-like waves. Each section of moss acts as a soft switch made from yoga mats and copper tape. We rewired the LED strips and adjusted the layout multiple times to get the response we wanted. Everything — the lights, the scent, the ambient audio — was designed to support a single idea: that a subtle human touch can create meaningful change in nature.