The Listening Bells are a doployable telecommunication system for audio-connecting to loved places.

The system

The Listening Bells are a spy-like emotional device, the metacrilate bell contains the electronic components, and on the tip a series of photovoltaic cells, that recharge the batteries and store energy waiting for your call. When calling the bell/phone “answers” opening the microphone up and letting you hear the sounds of the place, until the saved energy lasts. In that way calling a loved place becomes a precious experience that can be personal or shared with friends.

Imagine you are travelling to India and see amazing landscapes or sit under a shadowy banyan tree. Once you could have just taken a picture and looked at it nostalgically a few months after. What about establishing a real time connection with the places you love?

While on holiday you can deploy a Listening Bell onto a tree for instance and decide to call the device when you are back home, having the possibility to listen to the leaves being moved by the wind or birds singing as if you were still there.

Research

Major brands have recently become aware of the importance that customers give to the experience of using a product more that the possibility of owning it. Experience design is becoming more and more visible in the Interaction Design field and this project represents an interesting paradigm for this novel aspect of it.

Process

The Listening Bells project was developed for Hitachi, Japan. Hitachi was looking for novel designs using ad hoc network technologies for telecommunications.