the family computer

you walk over to the family computer. you sit down. the chair is too big for you. you turn on the PC and you wait. the monitor hums to life slowly, line by line.

you want to use the internet. but your mom is on the phone. so you wait. and you wait some more. when she finally hangs up, you plug in the modem. you hear the dial-up sound. the page loads one image at a time. one paragraph at a time. and then the cursor freezes. the little hourglass spins. you click anyway. nothing. and then, sometimes, the blue screen of death.

you sit there. you wait. you restart. you wait more. you try again.

here's the thing. the computer takes its time, and so do you. it's slow, almost ceremonial. it doesn't follow you anywhere. it doesn't ask anything of you. when it works, it just waits with you, until something arrives. when it breaks, it tells you. you fix it, or you walk away.

somewhere along the way, we lost the patience the machine used to have. i wanted to see if i could find it again.

the soft computer

the soft computer is a compact all-in-one, textile-based computing object that uses touch, craft, and embedded electronics to imagine gentler, more intimate ways of interacting with technology. rather than functioning as a productivity machine, it operates as a standalone computational artifact: an enclosure constructed from soft materials with machine-knit accents, housing a flexible e-ink display, capacitive sensing zones, and a haptic motor.

the soft computer is designed to be sat with, not operated. it emphasizes presence over output, care over command, and material memory over digital abstraction. four felt buttons act as a poetic keyboard, each biasing a generative text engine toward a different corpus. a trackpad zone controls the mood of language generation. a flexible e-ink screen slowly builds poems from touch.

what i mean by care

the soft computer started as an experiment in care, and i should be specific about what i mean by that, because it's a word that gets used a lot.

care, for me, means a machine that doesn't extract from you. that doesn't optimize you. that doesn't treat your attention as a resource to mine. care means the computer assumes you have a body, a tempo, a tolerance for ambiguity. it means the computer is willing to wait for you, instead of demanding you hurry up for it. care means the relationship between you and the machine is gentle, not transactional.

mark weiser, in 1991, called for something close to this. he called it calm technology. but i wanted to go further than calm. i wanted warm. i wanted tactile. i wanted a computer designed around care, not command.

in the age of AI, we need a moment of softness. to slow down. to ask what we actually want from our machines.

central question

what can a soft computer do that a hard computer never could?

what becomes possible when we design computers around softness rather than hardness, around care rather than command?

motivation

my relationship to electronics and computation has always been shadowed by dissonance with the language of hardness that defines the field. hard drives, hard logic, hard science. yet underneath every rigid circuit is something fundamentally soft: flexible wires, malleable solder, human hands, and patient care.

this contradiction deepened as i learned computing history. long before silicon, computation lived in textiles. the jacquard loom used punched cards to control woven patterns, and ada lovelace described computation through weaving. in 1757, mathematician alexis clairaut employed two human “computers” to refine halley's comet predictions. before the machine, computation was a body.

as computing industrialized, its soft origins were systematically erased. women who wired eniac, who wove rope core memory for apollo, and who performed invisible computational labor were framed as assistants rather than inventors. meanwhile computing hardened. speed became virtue. precision became power.

this soft computer argues that softness is not weakness. softness is the ability to flex, mend, feel, and adapt.

what it means to build a soft computer

the form

the soft computer is built in layers. months of trying different combinations until it felt right. soft enough to hold. firm enough to hold itself.

the chassis is modular. the buttons snap on and off. the electronics can be easily disconnected. the whole thing is designed to be repairable, opened, and modified — a counter to consumer electronics that ship sealed.

electronics architecture

the knit panel

the knit panel that frames the e-ink display is the part of the object you see first. it is a wool-cotton blend in lavender, knit flat on a Brother KH-930 from 1986. 70 stitches, 56 rows, roughly 10″ × 8″.

wool gives it warmth and a slight halo. cotton keeps it stable enough to sit cleanly behind the e-ink without sagging. the panel is mounted so the e-ink reads as if it's sitting inside a soft window.

a second knit pouch in the same lavender yarn holds the Raspberry Pi 5 inside. tucking the Pi inside a soft sleeve felt right. the part of the computer doing the most thinking is also the part you can't see, wrapped in the same material as the face.

using the KH-930 mattered. the machine is from 1986. it's the same kind of domestic technology that has historically been coded as women's work and dismissed as not-really-engineering, even though it's a programmable patterning system that predates much of what we now call computing. it sat a few feet from the Raspberry Pi on my desk and quietly makes the same point the project is making.

four buttons, four answers

each button represents a different relationship to computation. each one answers the central question differently. together they tell the complete story of the soft computer.

electronic text

most people hear “the computer generates text” and picture something like a massive model trained on the whole internet, predicting the most likely thing anyone could say. the soft computer is the opposite of that.

four buttons, four corpora. each one is a few pages of text chosen on purpose. press blush, the machine speaks in the vocabulary of ada lovelace, the eniac programmers, the apollo rope memory weavers. press yellow, it only has CS documentation and error messages to work with. it can't reach outside the corpus to find something more likely. it has to stay in the small specific world i built for it.

an order-2 markov chain, looking at the previous two words to pick the next one. the math is so small you could do it on paper with a tally chart. n=1 is gibberish. n=3 is the seam where statistics start to feel like writing. n=5 just regurgitates the source.

the soft computer doesn't predict the most likely word. it picks the next word from a list of words it has actually seen, in a small specific world i made for it. that's the whole model. everything happens locally. no internet, no cloud, no large language model. nothing you say or do leaves this object.

you might ask why the output is a poem and not a useful tool. the answer is care. a tool tells you what to do. a poem invites you to interpret. a poem doesn't optimize anything. it asks you to slow down and pay attention.

soft os states

there is no productivity state. there is no notifications state. there is no urgency anywhere in the system.

sensory system

the soft computer engages four senses simultaneously — unusual for a computing object — plus one often overlooked:

and one design principle that runs through all of them: slowness. the piece is rate-limited and intentional. it resists speed. in a world of optimized interfaces, the soft computer asks you to wait, to stay, to notice.

user testing

testing happened in two phases. with the prototype, conversations with peers and advisors shaped the early decisions: the inputs should be ambiguous, the output slow, the piece something you live with rather than operate.

with the actual build, what i didn't expect was how much it tested people's patience. the e-ink updates slowly. there's no progress bar. some people leaned in. others got visibly restless within seconds, reaching for their phone or asking if it was broken. that restlessness was the most interesting finding. the people who stayed described it as calming, even meditative. but getting there required unlearning something.

the things people asked for — sound, scent, warmth — are the things i can't wait to build next.

y2k revisited

i want to come back to the dial-up. the blue screen of death. the family computer. we had one growing up. but really, it was mine. i was the technical one, the kid who fixed everything for everyone else. computers were the first thing i loved figuring out.

i've watched technology go from some of the slowest times to what it is now. during my time, we used to wait until 9pm to talk to people for unlimited minutes. twenty years later, we pay for unlimited minutes and don't call anyone. and what's strange is that even the current generation, people who never heard a modem, who never waited for a pixelated photo to load line by line, sometimes feel a kind of nostalgia for it. for LimeWire downloads that took an hour and might be a virus. for blowing into a Nintendo cartridge to make it work. for staying up to write the perfect away message.

we used to log on. now we don't ever log off.

the soft computer is built around constraints on purpose. it has a small corpus, not the whole internet. one poem at a time, not endless content. a receipt you can hold, not a feed you scroll. and a finite memory, like the computers we grew up with — the ones that made you choose what to keep, and what to let go. the constraint isn't a workaround. the constraint is the point.

what's next

beyond the spring show and berlin, i want to keep building soft peripherals — things that are soft and fully functional. soft keyboards, soft pointing devices, soft screens, soft cases. and i want to keep iterating on the soft computer itself. a v2 with the sensory layers people asked for.

the entire project is open source. documentation, patterns, code, and corpus materials are all available so others can take it apart, remix it, and make their own.

make your own soft computer. or your own computer of any kind. it doesn't have to be soft. it just has to be yours. something built around your values, not someone else's.

the soft computer mini

in may 2026 i was selected as a fellow at the open hardware summit in berlin, where i presented a new object alongside the original thesis: the soft computer mini.

the mini is a working prototype and travel-sized extension of the soft computer — designed to survive a plane ride and live on a busy summit table. the original soft computer was a textile-based computing object exploring calm technology, feminist hci, and anti-optimization design. the mini takes its conceptual lineage — embodied input, generative text as ritual, textile as substrate — and compresses it into a hand-sized tarot device.

how it works

the device sits at rest on the table. a single ascii glyph rests on the e-ink screen. when a visitor touches the flower-shaped trackpad, the device wakes into an intro screen and invites a choice. six lavender felt mood keys represent six elemental corpora — care, dream, craft, code, bloom, void — each with its own thematic dictionary of titles, lines, and a sigil.

the visitor presses a key to arm an element, then presses the wider machine-knit space bar to draw a card. at the moment of commitment, the haptic motor hums beneath the knit. the e-ink renders a one-of-a-kind tarot card composed live: a border, a glyph, a title, a divider, three randomly chosen lines, the element's name, and a closing border.

with eight titles and eighteen lines per element, the device holds approximately 39,000 unique compositions across the six elemental decks. visitors never see the same card twice.

materials + construction

the body is industrial-grade wool felt — dense, holding its shape over time. the six mood keys and the flower trackpad are built as felt sandwiches: a colored wool felt top, a felt spacer with a centered hole, a copper-tape pad on a craft foam base, and a conductive fabric pad sewn to the underside of the top. press the felt and the two pads meet through the hole, closing the circuit.

the draw bar is the structural and material exception: a small machine-knit panel in lavender wool-cotton from the KH-930 used for the original thesis. the knit is soft against the finger, distinct in texture from the felt around it, and continues the textile language of the object upward into the input surface. a small haptic motor lives directly beneath the knit, humming on every draw.

audience + context

documentation + openness

openness is central. build process, patterns, code, circuit strategies, and corpus materials are documented so others can adapt the soft computer as a template for gentle, alternative interfaces.