The radio artifact and sensor array at the tree base. Figure 1, Pait, Nitsche and Biggs, TEI ’26 (CC BY 4.0).
Overview · Two archives, one encounter
Entangled Histories Radio connects live ecological conditions around a tree with a curated archive of Civil Rights speeches and music. A vintage radio replica turns this connection into an embodied listening experience situated in Atlanta.
The design contribution is a working provotype: an artifact that opens questions rather than claiming to resolve them. It explores how living systems can re-contextualize human histories, and how more-than-human design can attend to the political histories of a place.
Research question · Who controls the archive?
Two gaps frame the inquiry. Tangible heritage interfaces often retrieve fixed media through human-controlled objects. More-than-human (MTH) design can foreground ecology while overlooking differences and histories within human communities. This project brings those concerns into the same material encounter.
How might tangible interactions engage non-human living systems to surface the socio-political histories of a place?
Situated Rationale · Atlanta, Trees and Radio
Atlanta provides the project’s context as both a city shaped by its urban forest and a center of the American Civil Rights Movement. The design connects ecological conditions to historical arguments about interdependence, equality and environmental justice.
The vintage radio replica references WERD, the first Black-owned and operated radio station in the United States and an important platform for Black culture and Civil Rights voices. Its familiar form gives the archive a historically situated presence, rather than treating the enclosure as a neutral speaker.
Design approach · Materializing a provocation
The paper develops the project through site-specific framing, archive curation, environmental sensing, poetic mapping and construction of a tangible sound installation. The object makes a research proposition available for encounter and discussion.
A historical archive of speeches and music is interlocked with a living ecological archive: real-time conditions around a tree. Environmental changes determine when speech interrupts music. The visitor is invited to listen and notice, while the timing belongs primarily to the environment.
The mappings are designer-led interpretations, not literal translations of tree experience. This distinction is central to both the interaction design and the project’s ethical limits.
System · From environmental change to sound
Sensors at the tree base measure soil moisture, rain, humidity, pressure, temperature and volatile organic compounds. An ESP32 sends readings wirelessly to a laptop.
TouchDesigner receives the data. Python scripts compare readings with conditions and thresholds, then trigger selected archival audio. The laptop sends sound to the radio through a 3.5 mm connection.
In the default state, Civil Rights-era music plays continuously. When a threshold is crossed, a speech excerpt interrupts the playlist. Local sensor calibration remains part of the future development work.
Mapping · Making the interpretive decisions visible
Sustained dryness connects processes of growth and water with a speech passage using seeds and trees to discuss moral means and ends.
Rain or increasing soil moisture brings forward the metaphor of justice as flowing water. Changes in air quality connect an invisible environmental shift with reflections on technological progress and living together.
Pressure changes connect an approaching storm with collective discord and hope. Multiple sensor changes evoke the interdependence of lives and environments.
These are poetic associations selected by the designers. They serve as prompts for reflection; they do not claim that ecological readings contain, authenticate or speak for these histories.
Experience · Ambient, interruption, noticing, reflection
01 · Ambient listening. Familiar music establishes the radio as a continuous presence beside the tree.
02 · Environmental interruption. A sensor event brings a historical voice into the present without a visitor pressing a button.
03 · Noticing. The interruption invites attention to the tree, the sensor array and the shared conditions of the site.
04 · Reflection. Listening becomes an opportunity to consider ecological and civic histories together. This is the intended experience; the paper does not report a visitor study establishing its effects.
Research contribution · Three provocations
Living archives as interfaces. What changes when an ecosystem influences access to a historical archive, rather than remaining background context or a passive data source?
Attunement and ambiguity. How can an experience hold slow ecological rhythms alongside the urgency of social justice, without reducing either to a simple input-output metaphor?
Provotypes and historical interpretation. How might tangible artifacts amplify connections already articulated by historical actors, while making the designers’ interpretive choices open to critique?
These are design-research propositions grounded in an implemented artifact. They are not findings from a controlled experiment or evidence of improved historical understanding.
Positionality, limits and future
As researchers who are not African American, the Civil Rights histories are not my own lived histories. The artifact is offered as a conversation starter rather than an authoritative account.
The immediate next step is collaboration with Civil Rights historians and community members to co-design archival selections, conceptual mappings and ethical presentation. Further work includes local sensor calibration, expansion of the audio archive and deployment in museum or educational settings.
For design research, the next evaluation should examine the conversations and interpretations the artifact enables, including misunderstanding, disagreement and whose perspectives remain absent. The paper leaves the project’s reflective impact as an open question.
Publication
Supratim Pait, Michael Nitsche and Heidi Biggs. Entangled Histories Radio: Exploring Ecological Justice and Civil Rights Through Tangible Interactions. TEI ’26, Chicago, March 8–11, 2026. ACM, 7 pages.
Published work-in-progress · Georgia Institute of Technology · 2026
"It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." - MLK Jr.,Christmas Sermonfor Peace, 1967