Niki Marathia
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UX of radio waves
Week 1 of 2
Team
Our environment is saturated with radio waves. Mobile phones and their base stations, smart meters, satellite communications, radio and TV broadcasting, microwave ovens all use radio frequency electromagnetic emissions to function. Design an embodied experience of radio waves. 

Research methods:
AEIOU, creative toolkits
Amen Maheen
Clara Chow
Diya Agrawal
Lindy Qin
Molly Wensley
Niki Marathia

To understand the brief, we started by thinking about what an embodied experience meant to us. This was followed by an investigation into radio waves and their properties (Figures 1-3). 


Figure 1. What is an embodied experience?

Figure 2. What are radio waves?

Figure 3. What are the properties of radio waves?
Antennas, transmitters, WiFi, and Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception were among the topics we discussed (Figure 4). Realising that radio waves are always around us felt eerie. This sensation was also noted by Bridle (2014) in his writings on the electromagnetic spectrum. The Phenomenology of Perception helped us think past the unsettling implications of this fact. In his work, Merleau-Ponty suggests that freedom comes from understanding and working with the world we are already in, rather than trying to escape it (Glenn, 2022).


Figure 4. Where we found common ground between embodied experiences and radio waves.

AEIOU

This view made us want to understand the ways people adapt in places where some of that world becomes unreliable. Mobile data does not work as well in places like the tube, train stations, and shopping centres, so we did our AEIOU in these locations. I did most of my research on the Central Line, travelling from Bethnal Green to West Ruislip and back to Bank. From Bank, I hopped on the Northern Line to Elephant and Castle. 
Figure 5. The ground we covered in our AEIOU research.


I noticed that people checked their phones compulsively even when there was no signal. Most notably, someone was refreshing their Instagram feed despite no new content loading, while someone else remained on a video call even as the other person’s image froze. The rest of the group observed similar behaviours, including someone watching the same Instagram stories repeatedly because new ones could not load.

Figure 6. My AEIOU on the Central Line and Northern Line.

If our locations had poor signal, we wondered where else in the world similar issues might occur. In an open database of cell towers, London has far more recorded towers than the entire country of Russia (Open database of cell towers, no date). Although this does not mean that Russia does not have cell towers, seeing these networks mapped across continents was interesting.

Figure 7. Map showing recorded cell towers across the world (OpenCelliD, n.d.).
Figure 8. A dense network of recorded cell towers across London (OpenCelliD, n.d.).
Figure 9. Very few recorded cell towers across Russia (OpenCelliD, n.d.).

Creative toolkit

We used our creative toolkit to explore what WiFi might look like if it could be seen. We chose drawing as a medium so our participant could share her personal interpretation without being restricted by materials or scale. On an iPad, we asked her to draw:

  1. If wifi could be seen, what would it look like?
  2. What does wifi look like in a densely populated area, like a city, versus a remote area?
  3. If radio waves could be seen, what would they look like?

Figure 10a. If wifi could be seen, what would it look like?
Figure 10b. What does wifi look like in a densely populated area, like a city, versus a remote area?
Figure 10c. If radio waves could be seen, what would they look like?

The participant explained that WiFi felt enveloping and omnipresent, which she represented through circles and muted colours. In contrast, she viewed radio waves as dynamic and connection forming. The pink dots represent the points of contact between them and the devices they reach.

Figure 11. Imagining what a human router could look like.


Inspired by Dunne and Raby, who created furniture that gave material form to the presence of electromagnetic fields in the home (Twemlow, 2017), we wanted to physicalise invisible systems. We were not yet sure what the experience would be, but felt it would be impactful if users themselves embodied nodes in a network by becoming human routers.

Sources
Bridle, J. (2014) Living in the Electromagnetic Spectrum. Available at: https://shorttermmemoryloss.com/nor/2014/12/08/living-in-the-electromagnetic-spectrum/ (Accessed: 1 January 2026).

Glenn, J.D. Jr. (2022) The Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Available at: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/phenomenology-perception-maurice-merleau-ponty (Accessed: 1 January 2026).

Open database of cell towers (no date). Available at: https://opencellid.org/#zoom=4&lat=15.17&lon=10.94 (Accessed: 3 January 2026).

Twemlow, A. (2017) Design Noir: Introduction to the second edition. Available at: https://alicetwemlow.com/design-noir-introduction-to-the-second-edition/ (Accessed: 3 January 2026).