Future Soundscapes: show feedback

During the "Work in Progress" show I talked with people, discussed what they think about my project and the approach I chose for it, and also collected a number of ideas, with which people decided to respond to my four initial science-fiction scenarios. All of them concerned future.

These are the responses:

sound travel (surfing electroacoustic waves)

upbringing accompanied by sounds (audio), (also during pregnancy)

emotions triggers orgasms

brave new world

acoustic medicine

silent warfare (6.45pm)

an orchestrated, choreographed apocalypse

retro-active sound-reactive transport density

limit one sense, increase one sense

audio warfares (instead of military)

adaptation

healing + preservation of natural ability

sonic hygiene / beauty products

sound for digestion

sound gym

sound addiction - need to play ambient city sound to fall asleep

no more tools! Please! Let’s just deal / change the soundscape that exists?! LAWS against noise, haha? Or everything ‘just’ needs to be designed quiter? :)

sound encryption of thinking

soundophonic theater — replace cinema, providing a full sound experience

smart earplugs - that block out unwanted sounds but allow wanted sounds to be heard clearly

In my opinion, all these responses hold great potential for further exploration and development. But their main strength lies in their number. Therefore, I wish to use them and the general direction that they point at in the next part of my project—developing regular science-fiction scenarios and design objects with a story behind them. Having all that in plans, I am already thinking of various ways to go forward with my project and my general fictive approach towards designing. But this is a different story...

Digital Media on show

During our 'Work in Progress' show the Digital Media pathway received a really good response from the visitors. We were showing as a collective and had a small teaser to guide people to our geeky donjon.



It was conceived in an accidental overnight collaborative act by three of us. Coline B-N made the visuals, Jessika S put them to motion and Marek K created the music. You need to loop it and leave it playing for 8 hours non-stop to really get the flavour of our show space...

Future Soundscapes on show

A quick view on my 'Work in Progress' show setting in Shoreditch Town Hall.
In the room on the right you can also see Paul Ferragut's printers.

MACD 2011 'Work in Progress' Show

During sunny/rainy February of 2011, we have had our MACD 'Work in Progress' show in Shoreditch Town Hall basement. It was a big success and—most importantly—a great learning experience, thanks to which many trip and flops will be avoided during our MACD Final Show in June in the Rochelle School.

We curated our Digital-Media-pathway space, which met with lots of positive comments. I showed four scenarios for the Future Soundscapes project, which were printed and read. During the show I collected some valuable comments on each scenario and the overall approach to my project—it is going to be used during the development stage.

scenario #4 — Headpod Adaptation Courses

London. The City.

Financial Times called it a ‘Minefield’! and The New Economist dubbed it ‘Terra Incognita’.

Promising prospects are already in sight for the newly emerged headpod market, but there is still a long way to go before it steadies and the unwritten rules are set. For the past few years we were being given a flavour of the new, experiencing the future of sound from within the headpod. Hailed as the milestone in the development of human communications, it blitzed the market unlike any other piece of consumer electronics before. Profit from the last year’s pod sales beats expectations with the total of 3 billion Monetary Units.

Even so, London’s venture capitalists turn their eyes to a yet more lucrative opportunity ahead. Educating new users on efficient ways of using the pod means small margins, but a more sustainable and long-lasting business. In anticipation of all those, who grew up in the pre-pod world but need to stay on-line, adaptation courses are being designed.

Once the business gets going, a flood of follow-ups will fight for a share in the market. With no legal framework yet in place, we can struggle with confusion over the credibility and efficacy of the courses. One sure bet is that people talk and by word of mouth the best educators will be naturally selected. How many prospective headpod users would pay for more training, having once succeeded with their market search, is to be answered in the future.

Dotty Kultys, GNN, London.

scenario #3 — Sound Conditioning

London. Heathrow Airports. Terminal 9A.

We landed on schedule, which is quite unusual when travelling on the verge of the speed of sound.

Waiting for all 720 passengers to exit the plane through the front doorway. One by one, they obediently allow the crew to lead themselves out. After the flight everyone is stunned. It must have something to do with those eight para-sonic engines installed along the hull. But how did it work in those medieval Concordes? Six-hour long exposure to jet roar works really like an incapacitant.

‘Thank you for flying...’—a nice brunette stewardess puts something into my pocket. ‘Between you and me...’ she says and curtains-off the deck.

Struggling to find my way through all border and security controls. I remember taking a taxi...
Next morning I woke up in my apartment. Inside my pocket I found a ticket with contact details to an illegal sound conditioning facility. So this is what should stay between me and her... Huh! No way! I’m keeping away from this sort of dodgy treaments. Some say it protects from hearing trauma and as a result also from deafness... but I won’t get fooled again. After my first conditioning session I spent six days at home—nausea kept me sleepless for four days and vomiting every two hours. But the worst was that low-pitch buzz inside my head torturing me for a whole week.
I did not finish that treatment.

Though I know people who benefited from it. That woman I met on a flight to Cape Town—she was sound conditioned and she did not need any assistance upon arrival. She claimed to be an assistant during the implementation experiments in early 2011. But they never succeeded in developing a safe technology for the general use.
At least officially...

scenario #2 — Silent Rooms

London. Westminster. The House of Commons.

The Habitable Soundscapes Committee confers whether to recommend the new Habitable Soundscapes Bill for voting. The Draft has been prepared by a Society for Acoustic Change. There is a major public pressure on its hasty introduction. The draft has been generally positively reviewed. However, paragraph 18 (about the silent rooms on the Workdoing Sites) received some concerning criticism.

According to the paragraph 18 of the Draft, all Workgivers would be required to install, furnish and maintain a special room fitted with soundproofing panels or other silencing materials. In such spaces the Worktakers should be encouraged to spend a total minimum of thirty minutes per day in order to become exposed to the beneficial influence of silence, as well as to relax and reduce stress. The Workgiver Interest Intercessor had objected to this paragraph, expressing her concern about yet another financial strain placed on the Workgivers. According to the preliminary investigation into the potential impact of the proposed HS legislation, the costs of the new silence infrastructure could exceed all public and private expenses brought by the Smoke-Free Act by over 2000%.

During the Committee proceedings it has been unanimously decided that the Draft should be revised and amendments should be introduced. A special Habitable Soundscapes Commission has also been formed. Its role would be to conduct a programme of trials and experiments in the performance of silent rooms installed on a series of representative Workdoing Sites. Based on a report produced by the HS Commission and the programme evaluation, an informed decision would be made by the Committee in one year’s time from today whether to recommend the Draft for voting or not.

scenario #1 — Soundscape Headpod


London. Underground. Central Line.

Silence. We all sit motionless. Why do you wear this helmet?
It’s not a helmet. It’s a headpod.

OK, a headpod. So why are you wearing it?
It’s a communication pod. I can listen to music, talk with my friends, voice-browse the web, listen to radio... but also I can stay in silence whenever I want to. It’s good to have it. It’s isolating me from this terrIble urban noise, because it’s soundproof. Today this is important. It’s something like ear lids really, but much better.

Do you think a device that detaches you from others is generally good?
Well, everyone is detached now anyhow... you know. And it’s just a thing. It can’t really isolate anyone. It’s people who isolate themselves. I’ve seen some old digital shots from around 2010 with people on the tube. They were sitting, talking through their phones, watching films, playing on those old funny touchable gadgets, listening to music... They were already detached and isolated. A thing does nothing on it’s own.

So what can you do with your headpod?
Well, I can do plenty of stuff. I can stay in touch with everyone in my network. And I don’t need to switch between devices. Everything stays on my head. It’s really handy. And it looks smart.

But what about the real world? What about natural sounds?
What about them? They’re still there, no one took it. Birds still sing, the wind blows, water splashes... I can listen to it whenever I want to. I just need to press here and everything from the outside I can hear inside my headpod. But I don’t use it much—it’s boring.

It’s also electroacoustic. Don’t you find it impoverishing to hear the world only through a pair of speakers?
What? Why should I? That’s how it is... Do we find it impoverishing to see the world through window panes? If we need to become electroacoustic, then probably that’s the way it needs to be...

when science fiction meets design...

When science fiction meets design... what could happen?

Inspired by all research findings and readings I've done towards my dissertation (which was on communication with extraterrestrial intelligence and it's implications to our understanding of communication in general), I got fascinate by science fiction as a genre. Using it as a tool for designing could be very interesting...

I have already used science fiction as a vast resource of references and examples in my written work (this will be published soon). Lem, Leinster, Spielberg... all have pushed the genre forward and extended our understanding of communication by envisaging fictive scenarios of the human-alien encounter. Naturally, none of these would probably ever happen and it will stay pure fiction as it is now. But its true value lies in one's limitless thinking, which dares to imagine what might be just around the corner, and which still awaits to be discovered.

Now, having seen how others use science fiction to express their thoughts , I would like to test science fiction as a design tool. And my interest is in future soundscapes.