Knock On Wood is an internet-connected device that performs the gesture of knocking on wood. You press a digital button in a web app; somewhere else, a physical mechanism knocks on real wood, in real time.
It is part of Machines Responding to Superstitions, an ongoing series by designers Shashwath Santosh and Nithin Eluvathingal, which uses machines to examine everyday beliefs and rituals — drawing on industrial design, engineering, manufacturing, critical thought and world-building.
The network is the piece, not the mechanism
A single knocker would be a joke with a good punchline. What makes this work is the architecture.
Each knocker connects to the internet and communicates with a central server, so multiple devices can respond to users anywhere. The designers’ own example: someone in a Tokyo café triggers a knocker in New York’s Central Park from a browser. Each device needs a Wi-Fi connection; for the woodland installation in the project images, they used a portable Wi-Fi hotspot.
The thing that changes with the network is who the gesture is for.
Knocking on wood is a private act of superstition. Nobody is watching, there is no audience, the belief is yours and the gesture discharges it. It also has a precondition most people have never thought about: you have to be near wood. The ritual is quietly dependent on a material being within arm’s reach, which in a modern interior it increasingly is not. Veneer, laminate, MDF, particleboard — people routinely knock on things that are not wood, and know it, and feel the small deflation that comes with it.
So the device solves a real problem, absurdly, by separating the gesture from the person performing it. You no longer knock on wood. You cause wood to be knocked on. And since the knocker sits on a tree somewhere else entirely, what you have arranged is for the most authentic possible version of the ritual to be carried out, remotely, by a machine, on your behalf.
Whether that discharges the superstition is the open question, and it is the whole of the work. It is not answerable by design — it is answerable only by whether you feel better afterwards.
Where this sits
The series framing — machines responding to superstitions — puts it in a well-established critical design lineage, and the choice of superstition rather than, say, productivity is what gives it teeth.
Superstition is a perfect subject for a networked device because it is a belief about causality that the believer generally knows is not causal. Knocking on wood does not prevent anything, and almost everyone who does it knows that, and does it anyway. Building infrastructure to perform it remotely takes that doubled consciousness and makes it an engineering requirement: latency matters, uptime matters, the knock has to be real, on real wood — all for an effect nobody claims exists.
That is a sharper comment on connected devices than most work in this area manages. A great deal of what gets built for the internet of things is a mechanism serving a need that is not examined. Here the need is explicitly unexamined, by everyone, including the people who have it, and the machine is immaculate.
No video of the knockers in operation has been published alongside the project images, which is a shame — the sound of the knock, and the pause between button and thud, is presumably most of the experience.