Caitlin Morris

Devices & Wearables

InExChange

MIT Media Lab Research

Shared sensation as a medium for connection and play.

Design Principle:Encourage new forms of social language.

InExChange is a mixed reality interactive experience using custom pneumatic vests, breath sensing, and a responsive visual environment. Multiple participants each wear a vest that inflates and deflates to create the sensation of another person’s breathing on the body in real time.

The project explored how shared bodily sensation might support playful social connection and nonverbal interaction. Participants synchronized their breathing patterns to influence the visual environment together, often developing collaborative rhythms and communication organically through exploration.

Alongside the installation experience, the custom wearable devices also contributed to research on embodied interaction and haptic perception in multisensory systems.

Interactive Spaces

Interactive Public Art

Public Installations with Hypersonic Design

Large-scale interactive installations that invite participation, wonder, and play in shared public space.

Design Principle: Invite interaction without requiring it, and reward curiosity.

Diffusion Choir is a kinetic sculpture of 400 folded membrane elements, each capable of expanding and contracting individually via silent stepper motors driven by custom circuit boards. Choreographed by real-time flocking algorithms, the elements move as a single organism, tracing the invisible paths of a flock of birds through the space.

Life of Tree is a suspended kinetic sculpture whose branching form mirrors itself as it rotates, resembling a tree reflected in still water — using movement and symmetry to create a moment of contemplation in public space.

Both pieces are permanent installations, designed to be discovered rather than explained.

Role: lead physical systems design, electronics and software development, interaction development and iteration, subcontractor coordination from concept through installation.

Additional installation and experience work created for Twitter, Nike, Cartier, Hermès, and Google through Fake Love, NY.

Digital & AI Systems

Designing Social Interaction with AI

MIT Media Lab Dissertation Research

Design decisions about AI — who it appears to be, how it communicates, how transparent it is — change how people learn, engage, and grow.

AI systems are often evaluated primarily through performance or usability metrics. My work instead focuses on interaction quality: how different forms of guidance, collaboration, and social framing influence motivation, exploration, participation, and human connection within AI-supported environments.

Feedback ResearchDesigned and built an interactive platform exploring how the perceived social source of feedback changes creative engagement and effort. Participants completed creative coding projects while receiving identical feedback attributed either to an AI system or a human mentor. Participants revised more, invested more time, and produced more complex work depending on how the feedback relationship was presented..

Peer Interaction ResearchDesigned computational tools to understand how different interaction structures influence participation and conversational dynamics. Participants worked either with peers or with AI collaborators while solving complex graph and systems-thinking problems. Rather than treating AI as a replacement for collaboration, the project focused on understanding which interaction patterns support productive engagement and shared exploration.

Workshop & Experience Design

Day of Design

MIT MAD Professional Development Event

An event for educators with talks and workshops to teach design thinking itself — not just domain skills.

Design Principle: Constraint is generative; design to create the conditions for surprise.

Day of Design organized six parallel workshops, each teaching a hands-on approach to a different design dimension — Iteration, Storytelling, and Prototyping — as transferable skills that travel across disciplines.

Materials were designed to be distributable and replicable by other educators, with the goal of spreading design-as-practice beyond any single context.

Role: Lead co-organizer, curated and supported workshops, event design. Collaboration with MIT Morningside Academy for Design, supported by MIT Museum.