Sharing my midpoint work more publicly made me realise how big and diverse the audience is — and with that came a certain pressure. I kept reminding myself that my project won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s okay.

This has been one of the hardest projects I’ve worked on, mainly because I kept losing a clear direction. I’m deeply interested in human relationships and how we express love, but after sharing my work more openly, I realised that while my topic is quite universal, it was still lacking emotional depth. That realisation pushed me to question my methods and rethink the ways I was communicating my ideas.

At the time, the project felt too limited by the framework of interactive design. I started thinking about how I could involve more senses — how to make the experience feel more personal and intimate.

That’s how I arrived at a new direction: asking myself, what is love to me? Since I was forced to leave my country, I’ve been on a long journey of personal growth. My friends and family are now scattered across the world, and I’ve come to understand how important connection and memory are to me.

Ever since I was a child, my strongest love language has been giving gifts — thoughtfully chosen, personal ones. So now, I want this project to reflect that. It’s about how I share love: by sending small, meaningful gifts to the people I miss, across all the distance between us. A gift, to me, is a powerful tool of communication, it always carries a message, a memory, and an emotion. As Freud’s etymology of “gift” suggests, it creates both a cause and an effect. And that’s the kind of connection I want this project to hold.