Life Without Pain
Category
Undergraduate Thesis in Design
Year
2025
Software and Tools
Arduino, Touch Designer, Rhinoceros 3D
You Forget What’s Life Without Pain
Pain is a deeply human, inevitable, and highly subjective experience, shaped by biological, psychological, and social factors. This biopsychosocial nature makes it difficult to communicate—especially in cases of chronic pain, where its persistence over time affects mood, interpersonal relationships, and everyday life. In medical contexts, pain communication relies primarily on pain scales based on patient self-report, which attempt to quantify the intensity of the sensation. Although useful, these tools provide a limited perspective, reducing a complex and multidimensional phenomenon to a single numerical value. In response, more objective approaches based on biological markers have been developed; however, these methods also fail to capture key aspects of the subjective experience and its social dimension.
An inaccurate assessment of pain has significant consequences: underestimation can lead to insufficient treatment, while overestimation carries the risk of excessive interventions or dependency on analgesics. Added to this is a relational issue: in the absence of visible signs, reports from the person experiencing pain are often questioned by those around them—family members or caregivers (referred to here as listeners) and/or healthcare professionals—resulting in distrust, emotional strain, and isolation. This condition renders chronic pain an “invisible illness.”
Within the framework of this project, this situation is defined as social analgesia: the selective dismissal of another’s pain as an adaptive mechanism in response to the difficulty of understanding and validating an experience that cannot be fully shared. The loss of a shared perspective highlights the limitations of current pain communication tools and reveals a design opportunity to mediate, translate, and make visible an experience that often remains misunderstood.
The project develops a physical tool for communicating chronic pain, whose main design contribution lies in materializing a subjective and invisible experience into a shared relational object. The proposal takes the form of an interactive table that brings together the person in pain and the listener in a face-to-face setting, fostering a horizontal, intimate, and situated conversation around pain.
The table incorporates an interactive surface designed for direct bodily contact, where physiological sensors capture signals associated with the presence of pain and the body’s internal state (biological dimension). These signals feed a generative visualization projected onto a screen embedded in the structure. Rather than translating data into numerical values, the system renders them as dynamic, interpretable forms. The visualization can be consciously shaped by the person in pain through physical controls—soft, ergonomic knobs and sliders—that allow adjustments to formal qualities such as rhythm, density, or expansion, without relying on notions of “more” or “less.”.
This design decision shifts the quantitative logic of measurement toward a sensory and introspective exploration of pain (psychological dimension), while simultaneously mediating and enhancing its communication with others (social dimension).
From a technological standpoint, the system combines real-time physiological sensing, digital processing, and generative visualization, drawing on principles found in therapeutic practices such as guided imagery and neurofeedback. However, its innovation does not lie in technology as an end in itself, but in its integration as a shared, accessible, and manipulable language—one that enables the expression of a complex bodily experience.
The project’s social contribution focuses on rebuilding the connection between the person in pain and the listener. By enabling someone to say “it hurts like this” instead of “it hurts this much,” the object facilitates validation of the experience, strengthens empathy, and promotes what is termed collective inhibition: a shared acknowledgment capable of activating support networks. In this way, the design positions itself as a sensitive mediator between body, emotion, and relationship.