Notification Necklace
Masters Capstone Project (2019)
A research-by-design project exploring what happens when your phone's notifications become something you wear on your body. Supervised by Melissa Rogerson and Martin Gibbs at the University of Melbourne's HCI group.
Co-design Workshops
I started with co-design workshops with eleven participants (predominantly women) asking them to imagine and sketch their own notification jewellery.
People experimented across a real range, from subtle and sensory (notifications you'd feel before you'd see) to bold and expressive (make it visible, make it a statement). Themes that kept coming up: privacy and context, who gets to see what and when, and the idea of reclaiming some control over a stream that usually just happens to you.
The Prototype
A crystal pendant with LEDs inside, driven by an Arduino microprocessor and connected to a custom Android app over Bluetooth. Six platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, Gmail, Slack, SMS) each mapped to its own coloured animation. I chose crystals to disguise the LEDs when inactive. It needed to feel like jewellery, not a gadget.
Fairly bulky, as prototypes go. Light-up jewellery is yet to have its mainstream moment outside a club. But proud of it.
Wearing It
I wore the necklace every day for two weeks and kept a diary. It sparked a lot of conversations, particularly with female friends, about the role notifications were playing in our lives. This was 2019: Instagram still felt mostly social, likes felt meaningful, and we were only just starting to clock the effects on self-esteem and attention.
What surprised me was how emotional it was. Feeling the difference between a Slack notification and a message from a creative friend, through the same body, the same piece of jewellery. A more tangible way of observing my own digital life.
What I Took From It
The importance of interrogating the boundary between our bodily selves and our digital selves, a question I keep returning to.
I made this when the internet still felt mostly good. These days I find digital noise exhausting and reach for analog tools where I can. This project feels like a document of a particular moment, and an early sketch of questions I'm still working through.