Harsha Pillai ’25 has experienced the feeling of digital overwhelm firsthand. Inspired by her own experience, she created #Unplugged, a text-to-fax printer designed to sit inconspicuously on your bookshelf, allowing you to stay unplugged while still receiving words of encouragement from a chosen support system.

First-year student Zekun Yang’s Living Pixels light frame was recently featured on the Arduino Blog. The article opens with, “As smart devices become more ingrained in our everyday lives, it’s perhaps only natural that we start to think of them as living things. What if such gadgets actually did have personalities and emotions that we as humans don’t ever see?” Zekun’s Living Pixels project illustrates this idea in luminescent style, as a picture frame that shows a static pattern of lights when anyone is nearby. When people aren’t present, and the device is left alone, it displays a range of emotions on its 16×16 LED matrix—from sleepy, relaxed, and even angry.