When I was making the Concrete Crickets for the first time, I had this vision of people making happy sound art and tagging up the city in their own happy, personalized way. What I didn’t count on was the paranoia a lot of people showed towards the concept: I’ve had the cops called on me a few times, I’ve had people search me for bomb-making materials, I’ve gotten scorned a TON. It really got me thinking about how to deal with devices in a way that’s meaningful and informative but at the same time calming — and not freak-out-inducing.

Then I had the great pleasure of installing the Crickets at Conflux, and when I watched people interact with them on the street, the greatest side-effect happened: people would pause, look around, and then start to notice other things that had nothing to do with my little beeping boxes. As one passer-by noted, he could hear the cricket songs — but he was also now hearing about 20 things he’d never noticed prior as well. That, to me, was the ultimate win and was something I wanted to really focus on for my thesis.

So, the logical step was to take what worked with the crickets (small size, easy portability, relative inexpensiveness) and turn it on its side so that instead of watching you and making noise when you weren’t around, these new devices would listen to the world around them and let you know what you might be missing in a simple and calming display.

What I’m working on now are little city-embeddable sensor blocks — awareness outposts that will live in cities and report back findings in a very simple way. What I’ve started with are simple units that listen to the sound levels around them, and reflect that volume in the intensity of the light they shine. What I’m hoping to do is call attention to not only the big sound events that happen to city-dwellers every day (cabs, car horns, sirens, jackhammers, etc.) but also the more subtle or constant things (human conversations, subway rides, household machines, loud music) that do just as much to mentally and physically exhaust us but that we don’t categorize in that way at all.

So far I have a first-run prototype done up and I’ve done a bunch of user tests, and the feedback has been extremely positive. Most people initially treated the monitor like a little pet, which I didn’t count on, but works well for the concept. The first breadboarded prototype was a bit ugly, and didn’t get the message across at all — people just couldn’t relate. However, the second version is much smaller, cleaner, and easily anthropomorphizing so people formed attachments to it almost immediately. At first this worried me, but what I saw was that people would then carry it around, and after they’d gotten past speaking into the mic in baby-talk (which *everybody* did), they’d start speaking normally again and going about their previous activities.

However, every time they’d speak or a door would slam, the monitor would spike in brightness, and they’d look at me and ask if it was really that loud. Of course, the answer is yes, but we’re very good at ignoring things we hear every day. Then this “eureka!” look would come over their faces, and they’d start using the object to test other volumes — and that’s the win right there.

The platform was intentionally designed to be expandable with just a screwdriver and a cable, so the next step (currently under way) is to make breakout boards that attach under each unit — a data logger (that records to micro SD cards), an Xbee/Xport unit, a GPS unit, etc.

This is all obviously very much a work in progress, but I’ll have to present it in early May, so expect a much more thorough update in the very near future.