A Pair of pebbles.
A squeeze.
A buzz.
A heartbeat saying “I miss you.”
Pebble is a set of two pebble pendents that communicate across vast space and time.
When one of them is squeezed, the other will generate a quick buzz, like a heartbeat, saying “I miss you.”
The communication over long distance is made possible through BLE communication between the ESP32S3 embedded in the pendent and iOS APP and AWS web socket.
I'd like to address this as a novel form of media practice that focuses on the oversaturation of product design and digitial artifacts in life / society, and use the very practice of developing a full-stack tech product as a media expression / inquiry.
Through developing Pebble, I found myself grappling with questions about how technology mediates our most intimate connections. The project began with a simple observation: in long-distance relationships, we often find ourselves "dating our smartphones" rather than truly connecting with our partners. The constant presence of screens, notifications, and the pressure to craft the perfect message can create a peculiar distance even as we try to bridge physical separation.
This observation led me to explore how we might reimagine technological mediation of intimacy. I was struck by the pebbling behavior of penguins – how they use simple stones as tokens of affection and connection.
Adélie penguin and Gentoo penguins are species of penguins that present smooth pebbles used for nest-building to their partner as part of their courtship display. Male Gentoo penguins, who mate for life, will present a female with a stone. If a female is impressed, she too will find a stone, and they will go back and forth collecting the perfect rock collection until a nest is built.
Recently the term has evolved in social media to describe little deeds of love that remind your partner, friends, or family that you're thinking of them, such as sharing memes and ticktok videos, without engaging in a full on conversation.
It seemed to offer an interesting counterpoint to our current paradigm of digital communication. Not because it's simpler (though it is), but because it operates on a fundamentally different model of presence and connection.
Pebble is a set of two pebble pendents that communicate across vast space and time. When one of them is pressed, the other will generate a quick buzz, like a heartbeat.
Pebble helps you say "I love you and I miss you" anytime and anywhere in moments of life.
Working through this project pushed me to question many assumptions about how we design technology for human connection. Why do we often equate more features with better connection? Why has the smartphone become our default mediator for almost all forms of remote interaction? These questions led me to explore how a different kind of device might create different patterns of connection and presence in our lives.
The physical form of Pebble emerged from thinking about how technology lives with us. Smartphones demand to be looked at, held, and actively engaged with. They create their own gravitational pull on our attention. I wanted to explore what it might mean to have a technology that lives with us differently – one that can be worn, carried, or held without demanding our attention, yet still maintains a thread of connection to someone we care about.
I'd like to open source the project so that anyone could make their own pair of pebble, which is also exploring a new form of art practice, thinking about questions of access / distribution / and the burgeoning open source community in the new millennia.
The decision to make Pebble open-source wasn't just about accessibility – it was about imagining different models for how technology can evolve and spread. In our current moment, most intimate technologies come to us as sealed boxes from large companies. By making Pebble open-source, I wanted to participate in a different tradition of technology-making, one where tools for connection can be adapted, modified, and reimagined by the communities that use them.
Throughout this process, I've been struck by how our relationship with technology shapes not just how we communicate, but how we think about communication itself. When all our connections are mediated through screens and keyboards, we begin to understand connection itself differently. Pebble doesn't try to escape technological mediation – that's probably impossible and maybe not even desirable. Instead, it tries to imagine different forms of mediation, different ways that technology might live alongside us and help us maintain connections with those we care about.
The project has left me with as many questions as answers. How do different forms of technological mediation shape our experience of connection? What happens when we step away from the screen as the primary interface for digital connection? How might we design technologies that create different kinds of presence in our lives and relationships? These questions feel central to understanding how we might build technologies that better serve our need for human connection.
