time machine

Context

Design: Objects and Interactions is a studio class in the design minor at MIT. For this project, we designed and built interactive clocks that used an alternative measure of time.

Process

I focused on sound and how it changes over the course of the day. The same sounds tend to follow us through an average day: we wake up to an alarm, listen to a playlist while we work, and fall asleep to cars on city streets or grasshoppers in the woods. I wanted the user to have some control over what sounds they hear through the day. 

In the beginning, I played with different types of sound generation. I wanted to aggregate many of the same individual tones, such as a block of wood hitting cardboard, until it became white noise. To do this, I used rotating drums to stir different materials, which make sound as they tumble. I made a box to house three such cylinders, and used stepper motors and an arduino to control their rotation based on the time of day and user input.

Result

The three final materials I used in my machine were rice, beans and tinfoil. A further idea for the project that was not explored due to time constraints is to make the cylinder units removable such that the user could put in whatever materials they desired. This would make it more personalized and changeable.