Most emotional technologies reduce feelings into labels, reports, and behavioural optimisation, treating emotion as measurable data rather than lived experience.

Mycelia proposes an alternative emotional ecology where emotion behaves more like mycelium than information. Instead of assigning fixed emotional categories or symbolic colour systems, the project expresses emotion through abstract growth patterns, tactile interaction, and atmospheric change.

Combining a digital interface with a material lighting system, Mycelia translates non verbal behaviours including touch, pressure, hesitation, and absence into evolving visual and spatial traces. These interactions accumulate through a slower 14 day growth cycle inspired by mycelial cultivation, allowing emotion to gradually settle and transform over time.

The resulting traces develop into tactile mycelium lampshades that invite touch, scent, and sensory interaction. Through three emotional permeability conditions, Isolation, Communication, and Release, the lampshades alter how light diffuses and atmosphere is experienced within space.

Situated within quiet moments of everyday life, Mycelia explores how emotion can be cultivated, lived with, and reshaped through light, material, atmosphere, and time.