Context

One of the major conceptual inspirations we had for our project was the precedent "Ghosts in the Smart Home" by Lindley, Bardinar and Coulton. We really liked the idea of the devices in the home as a 'cast of characters' that are able to talk to one another, from relationship dynamics and act on their own individual agency. However, achieving actual speech is incredibly complicated and not something we were confident we could achieve within the scope of this project. Here, we looked at the project "Morse Things" that featured a set of IoT devices that communicated via Morse code. Morse code operates off 2 states - on & off- which was perfect because it was the simplest and most abstract way 'communication' could still be understood. While discussing potential household objects to use, the entrance lights from the movie Parasite came up, where they lit up as someone came up the stairs. We really liked how light could be used as a visual indicator of someone or something's presence, without revealing who or what that was, which was very 'spooky'. Combining these influences, we formed our cast of lights.