MIT Is Running a Course on Building Objects That Talk to the Dead

Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Media Group at MIT is running a Spring 2026 course called MAS.S62, "TeleAbsence: Designing the Future of Human Connection Across Time." Around thirty students are building what Ishii calls "TeleAbsence media": objects that create illusory communication channels with people who are no longer alive. The course materials are old typewriters, telephones, brushes, and pianos. Things that were once touched and marked by the hand of someone specific.

The concept is a deliberate inversion of telepresence. Telepresence connects people who are alive but separated by distance. TeleAbsence extends that distance to infinity. The project builds on Ishii's earlier work with inTouch, which created what he called "ghostly telepresence": a physical object that moves in your hands, making you aware of another person's existence through touch alone, without representing them through pixels. TeleAbsence takes that same instinct and asks whether the sensation of connection can persist after the other person is gone. The answer, Ishii argues, lives in the tangible. A piano that played a duet across generations. A telephone that carries a voice that no longer exists. The object holds the trace. Not synthetic recreation, not AI chatbots mimicking the departed. Physical residue.

Ishii frames the project around the Portuguese word "saudade," a deep longing rooted in what he calls the "presence of absence." The course epigraph puts it plainly: people die twice, first when they die, then when they are forgotten. What if the objects we build could delay that second death? What does it mean that the most advanced interaction design lab in the world is spending a semester not on productivity tools, but on grief?