2011-06-26

The End of Hearing: feedback #2

I collected 65 "Hearing Trade-off" test questionnaires in total. This is what I expected to have in the end of the Rochelle Experiment. So what will I do with all this now?



There are some aspects of the "Hearing Trade-off" test, which will determine the way I will need to treat the results, and which also became apparent already while conducting the experiment. One such problem is the fact that the test was semi-open (or maybe semi-closed) and that the answers may thus not direct anywhere explicitly. I need admit here that collaborating with a sociologist, statistician or any survey specialist in the future may be my lesson here. Nevertheless, I will try to put together and interpret the findings I managed to collected.

Whether I will be able to write comprehensible recommendations for the scientific and design professional communities is one thing. Another one is that the show in the Rochelle School was a great success! I managed to capture peoples' attention, inspire their imagination and make them think. Therefore, I have proved that it is possible to communicate science fiction based on scientific evidence to the public. It is also possible to engage people in a conversation focused around rather complex topics. Finally, it is now certain that people want to engage in the discussion about our future—there is hunger for communicating, explaining and democratising science. And science fiction proved to be a great tool of this purpose.

Above: an attempt at juxtaposing all collected "Hearing Trade-off" tests in one image. As this method of quantitative evaluation might have worked well for the first survey, this time I will probably need to employ different, maybe more traditional methods...

2011-06-21

The End of Hearing: interacting in the show



The MACD show at the Rochelle School has been attracting great number of people and it is hard to find a moment during the day to do anything else than offering my time in the gallery to the visitors. And it's great! The show is widely praised and especially our Digital Media sector receives some good attention.

The private viewing night was very busy. A lot of visitors were queuing to enter the first floor with our digital and interactive presentation. My work received some publicity both online (https://twitter.com/#!/marekkultys) and real-life while having a number of interesting conversations. Thanks to my sister, Dotty, I managed to conduct over 30 "Hearing Trade-off" tests on that one night. Also a big thank you to Mela (melayerka.com) who took all those photos for me. Well done!



















2011-06-16

The End of Hearing: the script

This is a post that by my negligence is posted too late. It should have been here long before the films published recently and even before any report from the workshop front. What I forgot to include is the script.

The script for the film I produced became the canvas for building objects, drawing diagrams, shooting the film and everything in general. So here it is:

We redesign the “Present” before it becomes the “Future”.

The Design for the Future Institute is an independent London-based think tank. We use design thinking and employ scientific expertise to foresee and evade the pitfalls, and dead ends of civilisational development. The DFI's role is to predict and redesign future changes from today. We do this by means of product design, changing human behaviour, as well as by inspiring scientific developments.

Today, the DFI launches a new investigation into what came alongside the technical progress by default. Noise pollution changed our soundscapes and new listening habits brought about new risks. In reaction to this, the DFI designers identified three critical areas for their informed intervention: mass hearing impairment, sound conditioning technology and augmented hearing implants. Each area has been explored in a scenario envisioning potential consequences of today's fiction becoming future reality.

At the Design for the Future Institute, we identify and analyse the pitfalls of civilisational progress. Our recent survey shows that most of us recognise an increasing need for more silence in our lives. If we continue to absorb more and more noise every day, very soon our soundscapes will become intolerable or even damaging to our hearing. At the DFI, we have been thinking about this problem.

This is the Otomixer—the hearing regulation tool of the future. It temporarily impairs human hearing in order to adjust its sensitivity to noise pollution. The straightforward “what you hear is what you get” interface translates equaliser settings into a customised drug compound, which can be used as a daily wellness pill or a life-long vaccination against noise. Adapting to the environment in this way is easier than rethinking our civilisation or changing the world around us.
At the Design for the Future Institute, we research and support new spin-offs from emerging technologies. Sound conditioning is a revolutionary method intended as a protection from noise-induced hearing loss. But unexpectedly, it is also a source of an adrenalin rush, and of great pleasure. We see it as an exciting and lucrative opportunity for the experience industry. At the DFI, we provisionally called it the “blasting sport”.

The Acoustic Amusements Centre is our proposal for creating an arena for blasting sports near the third runway at the Heathrow airport. It is designed to give a second life to an area degraded by noise pollution, as well as an opportunity to redefine the boundaries of what we will know as entertainment in the future. Although already raising a lot of controversy, the blasting sport is a fact.
At the Design for the Future Institute, we design and advocate the augmentation of human senses. Our evolving symbiosis with technology calls for even better ways of interfacing and communicating. It is also an opportunity to extend our natural capabilities. At the DFI, we motivate scientific research leading to reinventing our hearing.

AIR—the Augmenting Implant Radio—is a new, radical way of augmenting human aural faculty. It is a miniature radio receiver that connects to the human central nervous system via the cochlear nerve, providing an audible perception of everything happening in the ether. After implanting, the AIR capsule dissolves, enabling the neurons to grow around the implant. In the future, the AIR can help mitigate noise-depravation-based sleeplessness with adults, and given to newborns it can become a fully comprehensible sixth sense. Today, in the age of the information flow, quantitative perception of information is paramount.

Today, what we do at the DFI is science fiction. But in twenty years time this fiction may become the reality for us all.

This is why the DFI's strategy is to challenge the public with the visions of the future. This is in line with our mission: to educate people about current issues and to advise the authorities on prospective changes.

We want to confront you with potential changes happening in the future. We also want to include you in our design process. Every volunteering viewer, who wishes to take a leap into the future or respond to the presented scenarios, is advised to take our “Hearing Trade-off” test. In recognition of your help, you will be rewarded with an AIR implant.

We want you to redesign the future with us.

We ask for your feedback!

2011-06-15

The End of Hearing: feedback #1



I am currently conducting the Rochelle Experiment—a feedback session in the CSM MACD final show.

After explaining my scenarios to the audience, I am giving out a questionnaire with a variety of semi-open questions. I am aiming at collecting 60 feedbacks and presenting it in the CS'11 conference in Nottingham in July this year.

2011-06-14

The End of Hearing: films #3

And this is a separate post with the full, 6:50 minutes long "The End of Hearing" publicity release. Enjoy!

The End of Hearing from mrklts on Vimeo.

The End of Hearing: films #2

After two weeks of restless filming, cutting, recording, animating, tweeking and so much more, I finally created "The End of Hearing" publicity films.

The whole thing is 7:00 minutes long and divided into 5 chapters:
1] Design for the Future Institute intro;
2] DFI scenario #1: The Otomixer;
3] DFI scenario #2: Blasting!;
4] DFI scenario #3: Augmenting Implant Radio;
5] call for participation in the DFI's "Hearing Trade-off" test.

I uploaded all of them on Vimeo, so please feel free to watch it.
Thanks a lot to my sister, Dot, for letting her voice and face for the film, as well as my girlfriend, Mela, for letting her hand in one of the chapters.

These are the consecutive chapters #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5:

The End of Hearing #1 (intro) from mrklts on Vimeo.



The End of Hearing #2 (otomixer) from mrklts on Vimeo.



The End of Hearing #3 (blasting!) from mrklts on Vimeo.



The End of Hearing #4 (air) from mrklts on Vimeo.



The End of Hearing #5 (call) from mrklts on Vimeo.

The End of Hearing: scenario diagrams

To assist explaining the scenarios I prepared for the final show, I created three posters, which guide through the complicated processes of sound conditioning and blasting, radio signal reception through the AIR implant and artificial silence vaccinating using the Otomixer.

The posters are not intended to be self-explanatory. The processes are just too complicated to place them on one poster and not make it look too busy. And anyway, I wish to have those conversations with people coming to the show, asking questions, making strange suggestions, not understanding half of what I would be saying...

These are the posters:





The End of Hearing: private view & friends and family viewing

"The End of Hearing" is now comfortably set up in the Rochelle School in Schoreditch, London. The whole Digital Media section is placed on the first floor of the gallery, making it a nice and cosy place to be around all animating and prototyping mates.

The private view will take place today at 18:00. You need an invitation to get in, so probably if you got one, you'd be considering to come. If this is the case, please do not hesitate any longer—come and see the amazing work of the last year of the good and old MACD.



If, however, you have not been blessed with a magic invitation, please feel free to come on any other day between June 15th and 23rd, 10:00 - 18:00. I will be there every day conducting my experiment (the Rochelle Experiment), and I will be happy to give you a tour around the place.

Another piece of good news: my parents have decided to visit me during the weekend and they will see my work at the "friends and family" opening. Horray!

The End of Hearing: building the implants #4

The blisters are now ready.



So far I have only 30 implants assembled, so I cannot use all the packaging I produced, but after June 14th (after the private view) I will be soldering more of them. I plan to have 60 implants in total to give away to people visiting my project and sharing their feedback.

Below: blisters with AIR implants inside and a close-up of the AIR implant. Looks pretty sinister, I hope.



The End of Hearing: filming #1

For the purpose of a film, some necessary changes were to be made in my initial script:

1. the name of the think tank should have been changed. Trade-off Futures Institute sounds good, but it does not indicate any connection with design—and this is very important in my work, as I try to redefine the role of a designer.

2.the scripts should be 3 times shorter. Otherwise all that reading will bore the viewer to death... and will take definitely more than 20 minutes. In a gallery, in which there is 55 other work to be seen, no one has that much time to spend. My films should be something in between 5-8 minutes.

3. There need to be more focus on the role of design in my project. The scenarios are all fine and intersting, but there is no way I can communicate all scientific evidence for each of then in a 1-2 minutes long presentation... I need to focus and shorten the script, as well as make it more dramatic. Dramatic is always good.

So, to conclude, what I came up with can be heard in the films that I will link to later on. The voice-over for the film was recorded by my sister. Thank you for all your generous help, Dotty!

The End of Hearing: building the Otomixer #5

Finally it's ready.



The Otomixer is working well, is looking good, and is making people curious.

Next thing to do is to film it and use the footage in a publicity release film I am going prepare for the show (it will communicate each scenarion separately, all of them as a general theme, as well as how the viewers can participate in the project).

All effort can be now directed towards making the blister for implants and creating the films.

The End of Hearing: building the implants #3

The box with foam filling did not work really well as a packaging for the implants. First of all it had a rather "home" touch and a "friendly" feel. I do not want it to look like that—this is an electronic device, which is supposed to be planted inside newborns' brains after all.

So I decided to create a blister. Because there is probably no blister of this size available in the market, and because I wanted it to be rather rigid and strong, I decided to create my own blister desing and vacuum form them using 1mm acrylic.

Below you can see the form I created. Thanks a lot to Melvin and Billy for hepling me out with routing the holes. The mold is equipped with a number of 1mm holes, through which air will be sucked out (2 holes in each implant nest, 4 holes in the corners of the mold (to prevent acrylic wrinckling in that areas) and 5 holes along the axis of the mold.



I made around 30 vacuum forms, around 14 of which are actually looking good enough to be used.

Another thing is the back of the blister... it turned out that finding an adequate material and processing it took me even more time that making the blisters!

2011-06-13

The End of Hearing: building the Otomixer #4

When I came back from Gdańsk there was really no time to waste. On the very same day when my plane from northern Poland had landed in Luton, I went yet again to the workshop to continue my work on the Otomixer.

It took me a day to adjust the size, prime and paint the pre-laser-cut Otomixer main control panel. After assembling empty vials and plugging in the headphones, the device looked like this:



I took me several days to seal all the vials and pour the liquids into them. I used three food colourings (yellow, green and red), potassium permanganate (purple) and india ink (black). Vials are sealed with a termoplastic resin, which I got from my grandfather (it was used in Polish radio industry in the '70, but still does an excellent job).





Soon afterwards I started to assemble all necessary electronic components. Eventually, I manage to fit in 2 amplifiers (based no the stethoscope design that I build before) and an equaliser (5 band, instead of 6 band, which I used previously, but this is still the same circutry). It works all fine, and is pretty exciting when you can equalise the same voices you can normally hear around you (it's actually live equalisation). Unfortunately the differences in frequencies are not that distinct (even though I used capacitors ranging from several hunderds of pF to 10.000 times stronger ones of uF value)... This is something I might want to work on later on, improving my electronic circutry skills at the same time.