Grace Kind

Sensory Transducers

Humans have a limited set of senses. There are the five major senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) as well as a few lesser-known ones (e.g. balance, proprioception).

There are many phenomena, or qualities of phenomena, that are not immediately available to these senses - for example, magnetic fields or radioactivity. A certain subset of human-built sensors can convert phenomena that humans can't naturally sense into human-perceivable forms - for example, a compass converts magnetic fields into sight and a Geiger counter converts radioactivity into sound.

Let's call these types of sensors sensory transducers.

What sensory transducers exist, and what sensory transducers could exist? To investigate this, we can use a matrix of phenomena and senses, and populate each entry with a representative device that converts between them. Here's a version of this matrix- the green boxes represent sensory transducers that are in use today, while the yellow boxes represent "missing" combinations that could exist in the future.

Sensory Transducer Matrix

Scroll horizontally to see all entries.
From → To Sight Hearing Touch Smell Taste
Visible light (Sight) - Reading machine Refreshable braille display
A device that maps colors to scents - red to apple, green to grass, etc. Smelling the output would give a sense of the color balance of the surrounding environment.
A candy with a coating that chemically reacts to light exposure. The sweetness of the candy tells the taster how much ambient light there is.
Acoustic vibrations (Hearing) Spectrogram - Tactile transducer
DAW plugin that releases a scent that corresponds to the funkiness of the sound.
A pacifier that releases a flavor when the sound reaches a certain intensity.
Physical contact (Touch) Pressure mapping system Percussion instrument - Scratch and Sniff
A clear bitter coating that can be applied to valuable items. You could determine whether someone is trying to steal the item by licking their fingers.
Airborne chemicals (Smell) Electronic nose
A device that sounds an alarm when the trash needs to be taken out.
A tooth implant that vibrates when you have bad breath.
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A device that reconstructs a recipe based on the smell of the food. Useful for culinary espionage.
Chemical composition (Taste) Electronic tongue
An instrument that modifies a chord depending on the taste of a food. Sweetness adds a major 3rd, bitterness adds a minor 3rd, saltiness adds a 4th, umami adds a 6th, and sourness adds a 7th.
A spoon that vibrates when the food is beyond a certain threshold of spiciness.
A liquid additive that releases a distinctive scent when the drink contains alcohol.
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Particle radiation Geiger counter (display) Geiger counter (clicks)
A belt for radiation suits that constricts when radiation is beyond a certain threshold.
A device for nuclear facilities that releases a sulfur smell if it detects radiation, to deter future passers-by from entering in case of an accident.
A bioengineered oral bacterium that dies quickly when irradiated, leaving a bitter taste in the mouth.
Magnetic fields Magnetometer EMF meter Magnetic implant
A car accessory that releases a minty scent when your car is heading north.
A pudding with an iron fortified base layer. When placed near a magnetic field, the fortified layer will rise and become detectable near the top.
Carbon monoxide concentration Carbon monoxide sensor (Display) Carbon monoxide sensor (Alarm) Carbon monoxide sensor (Vibration) Odorizer
A dispenser that adds more sugar to the cookie when it detects carbon monoxide.
Voltage Voltmeter Loudspeaker Wall socket
An air freshener that releases a stronger scent when voltage is high.
A toaster that toasts bread darker when voltage is high.
Atmospheric pressure Barometer
A device that plays "Under Pressure" by David Bowie when atmospheric pressure rises above a certain threshold.
A hip prosthesis add-on that vibrates when atmospheric pressure drops below a certain threshold.
A device that releases a soothing scent when atmospheric pressure is low, to offset barometric pressure headaches.
A cocktail measuring cup with variable depth so that more alcohol is poured when atmospheric pressure is low.

Enumerating Possibilities

Here's the fun part.

In the boxes with no "real-world" equivalents, we can still imagine devices or systems that accomplish the given task. I added candidate inventions to these boxes - you can click the boxes to reveal them, and click the names to learn more. (Note that many of these are quite silly, and are intended more as a fun thought experiment than as a practical invention.) You might also imagine your own entries for these combinations and compare and contrast them with mine.

❗️ This method of listing and combining possibilities is known as Morphological Analysis.

There are more complicated forms of it, but even this simple 2-dimensional analysis demonstrates the power of prompting yourself to examine all possibilities to uncover unexpected combinations. Done often, this method will give you an intuition that the space of possibilities is much larger than the space of the inventions, or ideas, that are commonly explored.

Try It Yourself

You can try this ideation process yourself by creating your own matrix of dimensions and enumerating the (real and hypothetical) possibilities that result. For example, you might consider the following dimensions:


Last updated: January 20, 2025