Impulse
When someone you care about is far away, a phone call rarely feels like enough. Think of a long hospital stay, but also long distance relationships, family living abroad, or anyone who’s lost easy physical closeness with someone they love. Screens go dark, visiting hours end, calls run out, but the need to feel close doesn’t. That gap became the starting point for my master’s thesis, developed with a research partner, and grew from one specific case into a broader question: how can people stay meaningfully connected across different kinds of distance.
Impulse is a sensory communication device and companion app built around scent, light, voice and photography. Instead of another notification, it lets people share a scent tied to a memory, a soft pulse of light, a fragment of voice or a photograph. Small signals that feel like presence, not information. The object itself, a rounded dome shaped box in a purple blue gradient, was designed to sit on a nightstand like a keepsake, not a gadget.
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Grounded in research on loneliness and sensory communication and shaped through testing and iteration, Impulse asks what communication could feel like if it were built around being understood, not just staying in touch.
Fictional brand concept developed in 2026 as part of my master's at Elisava