Above & Beyond; Exploring tech & design through sound with Max Björverud.
Above & Beyond events are held internally for the Above team. The learnings and take-aways are written by Renee Semko Gonzalez and (sometimes) edited by myself. I can only hope that this article (and every other article we share) offers you as many ideas and inspiration as it has our team. This article will showcase where and how sound can help elevate a product or service.
It’s a new year at Above, but rather than make lofty resolutions that are hard to keep up with, we thought we’d usher in the nascent stage of 2021 with some topics for our Above & Beyond talks that draw inspiration from another nascent stage in life: childhood. While we don’t claim to be experts in designing specifically for children, there’s no denying that children undoubtedly factor into a lot of our work.
Lucky for us, we kicked off Above & Beyond 2021 with our very own in-house hacker Max Björverud, whose past work often puts children front and center. Before joining Above last year, Max worked as an artist and sound designer whose work includes museum exhibits, installations, exhibitions, and, even, a singing toilet.
While presenting his body of work, it became apparent that many of his projects included children in the target audience, such as Jobblabb, a museum exhibition in Norrköpping, Sweden aimed at expanding children’s awareness of potential career paths beyond what they’re traditionally exposed to at a young age (re: cop, firefighter, doctors, and other traditional roles they see in children’s media).
When asked about why he worked on so many projects that focused on children, Max noted that he didn’t intentionally set out to create art for children. Rather, his preferred medium for creating art — sound — happened to resonate well with children. “Kids are usually just the first to stop and notice something, but sound is an effective medium for engaging people of all ages because it’s so subjective and personal,” says Max.
Max’s work reminded us how effective sound design can be as a tool to drive or motivate behavior because it solicits strong emotional responses that are intertwined with our personal experiences and memories. Highlighted below are few of Max’s projects that we feel help illustrate where and how sound can help elevate your design.
Amplifying experiences
Together with his frequent collaborator Håkan Lidbo, Max created an exhibit for the electricity company E.ON here in Sweden aimed at gamifying the sustainability energy experience. Throughout the exhibit, kids could play arcade games that “generated” sustainable energy through sources like wind and the sun. In this setting, sound was used to round out the gamified experience.
Max pointed out that another museum exhibit he worked on, the aforementioned Jobblabb, utilized sound to create a harmonious experience throughout the different parts of the exhibit. “Sound can make museums noisy and chaotic, so I used the same tempo for the music throughout the exhibit to create harmony rather than distraction,” he explained. In this regard, sound can provide the red thread needed to guide users through an experience.
Encourage spontaneous discovery
Another one of Max’s collaborations with Håkan Lidbo was the Singing Tunnels project, which aimed to transform the notion of public tunnels from “badly lit, scary acoustics, stinky and dirty” to something more positive. The installation included a microphone that would detect the pitch of a sound it picked up using PureData and play the same pitch back to you in the form of a sampled female voice so the tunnel could sing with you. The singing tunnels installations found their way into various tunnels throughout the world from Stockholm to Tokyo to São Paulo. But, what we really liked about this project was the spontaneity of discovery that it’s set up encouraged. Max told us that he once happened upon a mother and child playing with the tunnel by coincidence as he was passing through. Including sound in a space that people usually scurry through and overlook while trying to get from point A to B transforms the space into a playful one that encourages users to stop and notice it.
Create teachable moments
Max’s work also suggests that sound is an effective medium for creating teachable moments for adults and kids alike. He recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign with Håkan Lidbo earlier for Synth Bird, a DIY synthesizer kit that teaches users about music, soldering, biology and urban art. Synth Bird can be used by anyone, but it’s intuitive graphics and low entry point to soldering appeals well to kids. The interesting difference in Synth Bird compared to much of Max’s work is that sound in this case is the final outcome of the project (ie. a playable synthesizer) rather than the entry point (ie. a singing tunnel that catches your attention)
Prompt cultural reflection & consideration
While Max’s work points to the power of sound as a guidance tool for users, he reminded us that the subjectivity of sound isn’t just personal, it’s also cultural. He recalled a project he worked on recording sounds in Kenya, where the rhythms were different from the typical 120 bpm, 4/4 time signature used in Western culture. The consequence of listening to music at speeds and tempos were not culturally conditioned to is that we “feel like something is not right” according to Max. This cultural implication of sound speaks to its power as a force to move users, either by bringing them together or dividing them apart. Consequently, we should also consider the ethical implications of what happens when we design with sound. It is a tool not to be used carelessly or in aesthetic vain.
Seeing Max’s work kicked off this year on an inspiring and reinvigorating note. We were particularly moved by a comment he made about the difference between children and adults. “Kids usually interact with my art first because they’re much more daring in their exploration. Adults are taught not to touch museum exhibits but kids aren’t.” This got us thinking about how child explorers wane into adult observers over time.
If a vital component of our job as designers is to explore, how can we maintain our child-like curiosity? Moreover, is it even possible to maintain as the constraints of the reality of adulthood are fully realized? Perhaps, most alarming, is product designs becoming boring as a consequence of our adulthood? All these questions and more will be explored in our next Above & Beyond with former Design Director at Lego, Magnus Göransson.
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