The membrane dissolves.
I've been thinking about hygiene as architecture—not of spaces, but of consciousness. Picture this: your skin is a screen, constantly negotiating what stays in, what gets pushed out. But here's where it gets strange—hygiene isn't about cleanliness. It's about borders.
When dust settles on my keyboard, I see invasion. When rain soaks my jacket, I call it weather. Same particles, different territories. The dust is "dirty" because it crossed a threshold I didn't authorize. The rain is "natural" because I expected the sky to leak.
We've built our entire sensory apparatus around this inside/outside binary. Your smartphone knows which side of the glass you're touching. Your home security system thinks in terms of intrusion and belonging. Even your body's immune system is just hygiene with artillery—a bouncer at the cellular nightclub, deciding who gets past the velvet rope.
But what if we dissolved this boundary? What if "clean" and "dirty" were just weather patterns in the same atmospheric system?
I'm imagining interfaces where contamination becomes collaboration. What if we could design a surface that changes texture based on what it encounters—not to resist, but to dance with foreign elements? This is the kind of interaction design I dream about for post-hygiene futures.
The forest floor doesn't distinguish between leaf and soil—it composts continuously. My coffee cup doesn't judge the fingerprints