Imagination reorganised in a responsive world

My six-year-old nephew has a special mug for his morning milk. You pour hot milk into the mug, and it changes colour. As the milk cools, the mug returns to white. Drinking milk from any other, non-responsive mug is not as easy for him. The idea that objects in his environment respond to him matters to him as he grows up. Asking Alexa to play a song at his home in Bangalore so routinely has prompted him to yell at a black, round bottle cap at my place in Mumbai. His expectations are clear: the things around him may be non-living, yet they must be animate and responsive.

Responsiveness today has reached the most basic block (quite literally) of play, too. There was a time when LEGO bricks simply clicked and stacked. Everything beyond that came from the child’s imagination. A spaceship took off because the child supplied the sound of its engines; a minifigure spoke because the child gave it a voice. The brick itself remained inert, but the child made it alive through sound, movement, narrative and intention. With the arrival of sensor-enabled bricks and other responsive elements, that relationship is beginning to change. A structure can emit a sound when moved, a component can react to proximity, and a configuration can trigger haptic feedback. The object is not autonomous, but it is no longer entirely passive either. This raises an intriguing question: what happens to imagination when the things around us begin to respond?

The obvious answer might be that technology is taking over some of the work that children once did themselves. But that would miss the more interesting possibility. Responsive objects may not reduce imagination so much as reorganise it. When a brick supplies a sound, movement or reaction, the child no longer needs to imagine every aspect of the object coming alive. The child and the object now share some of the foundational work of animation, potentially freeing the child to construct more elaborate narratives and complex forms of play. In this sense, creativity does not necessarily disappear when objects become responsive; the nature and location of creative effort can change. The relationship between the child and the object becomes less about the child projecting everything onto an inert material and more about imagination emerging through an interaction between the two.

What makes this shift particularly interesting is that it may extend well beyond children’s toys. We already live among objects and systems that respond to us in small but increasingly familiar ways. Our phones predict the next word we might type, digital platforms suggest what we should watch next, and voice-enabled devices respond to questions and commands. Individually, these are almost insignificant moments, but collectively they create what we can think of as an environment of micro-responses. Responsiveness gradually stops feeling novel and starts feeling normal. We begin to approach objects with an expectation that they will acknowledge our actions. A button no longer merely invites us to press it; we press it and wait for something to happen. Once this expectation becomes established, even silence can become noticeable. An object that does not respond may appear deficient despite functioning perfectly. The object itself has not necessarily changed, but the conditions of our encounter with it have.

This has implications for how we think about products, design and consumption. We have traditionally evaluated products by what they offer in terms of utility, performance or meaning. In a world of responsive objects, we may also need to consider the quality of the interaction they create. A sound, a flash of light, a movement or even the timing of a response can become part of the experience. Responsiveness is therefore not merely a technical feature; it is something that we can design, calibrate and feel. This changes the question for designers and marketers from simply asking, ‘What does this product do?’ to asking, ‘How does this product interact with me?’ More importantly, every responsive product contributes to the expectations consumers carry into their next interaction. As responsiveness becomes embedded in everyday environments, businesses are not only designing products; they are also helping to shape what people come to expect from the objects around them.

Key takeaways for managers and practitioners

Before your next launch, ask one question: what will my customer imagine, and what will my product do for them?

The study ‘The reorganisation of imagination in responsive play’ (Journal of Customer Behaviour, Volume 25, Number 3, Autumn 2026) offers four ways to answer it.

Map what your product now does for the customer. When the object handles basic animation, users can build more layered narratives and more elaborate systems of play. Identify which part of the experience your product carries, and what that frees your customer to create.

Leave some gaps open. Where responsiveness fills the gaps that users once filled through projection, imagination can recede. Decide deliberately which gaps to fill and which to leave open, so your product invites participation and does not replace it.

Treat behaviour as a design discipline. Meaning and utility are no longer enough. Design, time and calibrate how your product reacts and build ‘behaviour’ into your briefs, prototypes and customer testing.

Benchmark against a responsive world. Customers now judge your product against everything else that responds to them. Audit your touchpoints for moments where a customer acts and nothing happens.

This blog is based on the article “The reorganisation of imagination in responsive play”, authored by Prof. Karman Khanna and published in the Journal of Customer Behaviour.

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