Care cannot simply be programmed as the correct response to a predetermined condition. Nor can care mean that an environment endlessly accommodates the bodies acting upon it. An ethics of responsiveness would have to account for the limits on both sides of the relationship: what a body is required to reveal to an environment, and what an environment is required to make available in return. The difference can be expressed as a shift in the purpose assigned to responsiveness. The logic of Breathing Room can therefore be understood not as:
sensing → responding → serving
but as:
sensing → responding → negotiating distance

Personal space, from this perspective, is no longer only the physical distance surrounding an individual body. It becomes a capacity to negotiate proximity, visibility, legibility, accessibility and withdrawal within a relationship. Breathing Room extends this capacity beyond the individual: boundaries are produced through what bodies and environments make available to — and withhold from — one another.

The ethical question is therefore not simply whether a technological environment can recognise us, nor whether it can respond to us. It is whether a relationship can remain possible without either side becoming completely available to the other. And whether responsiveness can include the possibility of saying:
enough.

A boundary that can never resist is not really being negotiated.