Stay Tuned Commitment Radio
by David Chiu & Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino
Commitment Radio
Commitment Radio examines radio presets and what it means to make a choice. Generic, digital preset buttons affect the meaning and consequence of choosing presets, turning an otherwise strong statement (”This station is me.”) into a transient convenience.
The functioning physical prototype of Commitment Radio allows you to scan for stations by moving a marker along the tuning strip. To listen to a station, however, you must push the marker into the radio, leaving an indelible mark.
Over time, Commitment Radio will become personalized with your changing musical tastes, political leanings, locations, and age. Because the radio has a finite amount of space, Commitment Radio encourages deliberateness in your choices and actions.
Stay Tuned
Stay Tuned focuses on the event of listening to radio, exploring humans as a physical and conceptual component of the radio.
Stayed Tuned plays low-level static until a person touches the radio. As long as the listener remains in contact with the radio, a randomly selected station continues to play. When the listener breaks contact with the radio, the signal reverts to static.
Without a listener, radio signals are no different from static. Listeners complete the circuit of radio, and by using the listener to collect signals for the radio we change the act of listening from passive to active. Requiring contact with Stay Tuned elevates radio’s role from background noise and asks you to engage in the moment, to focus on the activity at hand.
Project credits:
Project by:
David Chiu
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino
This project was completed as part of ‘Strangely Familiar: Repurposing Everyday Devices’ course led by Heather Martin, Massimo Banzi, Yaniv Steiner and Reto Wettach at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea during the winter of 2004. The assignment it was created to fulfill dealt with techniques for rapid prototyping by repurposing consumer electronics.
