MessageBox.html

<div class="project-container">
	<div class="img-project-container">
		<div class="img-container">
			<a class="img-container-link" href="#">
				<img id="0"
				data-original="img/Message-Box_00.jpg"
				data-original-m="img/Message-Box_00_m.jpg"
				data-original-s="img/Message-Box_00_s.jpg"
				alt="Message Box"></img>

				<img id="1"
				data-original="img/Message-Box_01.jpg"
				data-original-m="img/Message-Box_01_m.jpg"
				data-original-s="img/Message-Box_01_s.jpg"
				alt="Message Box Opening"></img>

				<img id="2"
				data-original="img/Message-Box_02.jpg"
				data-original-m="img/Message-Box_02_m.jpg"
				data-original-s="img/Message-Box_02_s.jpg"
				alt="Message Box Opening 2"></img>

				<img id="3"
				data-original="img/Message-Box_03.jpg"
				data-original-m="img/Message-Box_03_m.jpg"
				data-original-s="img/Message-Box_03_s.jpg"
				alt="Message Box Listening"></img>

				<img id="4"
				data-original="img/Message-Box_04.jpg"
				data-original-m="img/Message-Box_04_m.jpg"
				data-original-s="img/Message-Box_04_s.jpg"
				alt="Message Box Open"></img>

				<img id="5"
				data-original="img/Message-Box_05.jpg"
				data-original-m="img/Message-Box_05_m.jpg"
				data-original-s="img/Message-Box_05_s.jpg"
				alt="Message Box Tech"></img>
			</a>
		</div>
		<div class="img-footer">
			<span class="currentImgNum"></span>/<span class="totImgNum"></span>
		</div>
	</div>
	<div class="text-container-wrapper">
		<div class="text-container">
			<p class="project-info-title">overview</p>
			<p class="project-description">Message box is a design experiment with time and memory</p>
			<p>Leave Message Box on a shelf in the living room or on a bedside table. Over time, it will detect voices from its surroundings. Sometime in the future, you may remember about Message Box. By removing the lid, you can listen to a random sound stored in its memory. The laugh of an old roommate, an argument with an ex-partner or loud voices from a house party. Often these memories will make you smile, perhaps with a hint of nostalgia. But sometimes, these unexpected messages might be powerful enough to instigate reflection. A sample from your past could influence your future. </p>


			<p>
			2015.......<a href="https://fabrica.it/" target="_blank">Fabrica</a><br>
			Role.......Concept/Interaction Design/Technology<br>
			Photos.....Shek Po Kwan<br>
			Website....<a href="https://orgonomyproductions.info/messagebox/" target="_blank">site</a></p>

			<br><p class="project-info-title">information</p>

			<p>When me and product designer Ryu Yamamoto started to think about Message Box we wanted to design an object that could somehow take part in human emotive life. Something that added an unexpected factor which, even if marginally, would interfere on its normal evolution without losing value over time.</p>

			<p>We soon realized that involvement of memory could constitute the best approach for obtaining such results. People's memory represent inevitably sensible information to them, and at the same time it never exhausts its content, for is on its nature to be continuously updated over time. Message Box aimed so to serve as a constant source of involuntary memories, those events and objects through which past times are brought back to our present.</p>

			<p>We thus had a basic behaviour for our product. It would record events from its users' life and reproduced them in a different time, so to generate a sort of steady yet unpredictable feedback between their past and their present. Finding a way to to so constituted then our next step. We needed to define what sort of events Message Box would record and reproduce and what sort of interaction suited the best for accessing stored memories. </p>


			<br><p class="project-info-title">design + technology</p>
			<p>The design of the Message Box is a reinterpretation of music boxes, those small mysterious trinkets that play an old melody whenever opened. Instead of childish melodies, Message Box would play voice recordings when opening its lid, and as in the case of musical boxes, this would occur not in defined occasions, but in spontaneous moments of nostalgia or curiosity. </p>

			<p>The object is composed of two pieces: a base made of fabric and metal, produced in the same way as a lamp shade, and a sanded glass dome, serving as a lid for the object. Inside the base is a Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive Linux computer, which is programmed to detect, record and store voices from its surroundings. When the user removes the lid and rests his ear on the top of the structure's cone, this triggers a touch sensor which signals the computer to play back a random voice snippet from its memory.</p>
		</div>
	</div>
</div>