Despite a growing wave of health-tech innovations, and increased access to sexual health information, many teens continue to face emotional and sexual development without adequate tools to understand themselves, process their feelings, communicate openly, and navigate complex relational dynamics. Traditional sexual education often overlooks the emotional and introspective aspects of growing up: topics like identity, consent, boundaries, and intimacy remain under-explored in classrooms. While digital platforms hold promise, they often feel contradictory, too clinical, or simply unreliable.
This project asks: Can we design an emotionally intelligent space and conversational system that helps young people understand and explore their feelings, while building emotional literacy and confidence?
TALI is a journaling ecosystem designed to help teens aged 13–16 track and reflect on their emotions, unpack experiences, and learn about intimacy, all in a safe, approachable, and judgment-free space. Rather than offering rigid health content, TALI focuses on building emotional literacy as the foundation for healthy relationships and self-advocacy. More than a tracker, TALI listens: providing prompts, surfacing patterns, and gently encouraging growth over time.
The core system revolves around two objects: the Ground, a home-based conversational agent that facilitates daily voice-based reflections, and the Seed, a portable emotion-logging keychain that supports lightweight emotional check-ins on the go. The accompanying App acts as a personal archive, offering visual summaries of mood trends, journaling history, and “soft milestones” like realisations or emotional breakthroughs. The tone of interaction is warm, curious, and non-authoritative, designed to feel like a thoughtful companion, not a therapist or a teacher.
TALI’s multimodal interface, part tangible, part conversational, part visual, invites users to slow down, reflect, and recognise patterns in their emotional life. It proposes a design of practice, presence, and habit building, emphasising emotional fluency as an everyday skill.
Ultimately, the project provokes a broader cultural question: What would it look like if emotional education were woven into the fabric of daily life?
TALI’s aim is to foster a generation that approaches emotional and sexual health not with fear or confusion, but with curiosity, confident language, and care.
