AirTime

Air Time

Mentor: Roee Bigger

With the shift to hybrid work, the home has become a central workspace, fundamentally changing the human dynamics in the workplace. This transformation inevitably leads to a loss of spontaneous, informal interactions – the same ones that used to be the backbone of social bonds, a sense of belonging, and creativity in the workplace. These small moments of casual, unscheduled communication shape the human climate of any work environment.

The project presents a simple physical-digital object connected to an app, which allows co-workers to express availability, mood, and openness to interactions in a non-intrusive, non-verbal manner. The result is a new layer of ambient communication in the home workspace: a quiet, intuitive presence that invites soft, optional forms of interaction between colleagues. Rather than replicating the traditional office setting, the project offers a human-centered, sensitive alternative that allows remote workers to feel each other’s presence from afar. Drawing on principles of interaction design, emotional design, and ethnographic insights, this project reimagines interpersonal space when no shared physical space exists, proposing a new design language for casual communication in a distributed work reality.