Rooms Made of Light

Hanji and shoji screens let a household hold several activities in one room by managing light and sound rather than building walls. Layering, not partitioning. It is a spatial idea that maps unusually well onto a small screen.

Four product teams rebuilt a familiar interface pattern using that logic: no modal that blocks, no view that fully replaces another, translucency doing the work a hard edge used to do. Each rebuild is shown running, next to the original, with the usability testing that followed.

Two of the four made things worse, and are shown anyway, because the failure is where the translation actually gets examined.