What if you could hear a story... and then suddenly lose it?
When the Voices Fade is a proposed interactive installation about historical erasure and the voices that disappear from the stories we inherit.
When the Voices Fade
An audio-interactive installation exploring how women's contributions can disappear from the historical record, and what it means to be a witness to that disappearance.
Role: Experience Design, Concept Development
Team: Moe Aguilar, Yufei Chen, Joy Lim, Devika Santosh, Benjamin Walker
The Experience
Constraints and Criteria:
- Interactive
- Make humans aware of their complicity
- "Will this project make the world a better place?"
- Well-researched premise
- Visual Design to sell the idea
Our Exhibit
We wanted to focus on how history is always written by the victor, and how we are complicit in whether or not we educate ourselves on what's happening in the world, because today's present is tomorrow's history. We really wanted to focus on erased stories and silenced voices, and how information that is out today may be gone tomorrow.
The Concept
A physical structure with audio interactive components.
As you walk past it, you hear voices telling their stories. You feel educated, like you're learning something new. And then suddenly, the voices are cut off. Radio silence. You try to move back to where you heard the voices, you try to bring them back, to hear the end of their story, but you can't. It's lost.
Early concept inspiration, and sketch. Notice how one side is higher to represent the information always being louder. The other sides sees a smaller voice, taking a long time to rise; and when it does, it's shut down almost immediately, and again takes a long time to gather up and rise again.
Ideation
- Access to information opens up and shuts down in waves.
- We propose a sculpture with an element of audio interactivity to depict these waves of knowledge and access to it.
- As the listener walks past the sculpture – audio keeps rising and they’re learning, getting more knowledge.
- Then, suddenly, the voice cuts off.
- Concept of being at the right place, right time
- Listeners are complicit
- Trying to educate yourself -> trying to help out
User Experience
Inputs
User being present physically at the right place.
User modifying the sound waves on their mobile phone app to fix the distorted audio.
⬇️
Outputs
Clear audio that would slowly distort and be lost again.
Resources containing pieces of hidden/untold history.
Value Shifts
As we've always been taught to look at stories from the perspective of the audience, the creators, and the characters, we decided to evaluate the values shifts each of these groups will experience by going through our experience.
Guests: Denial to Complicity
Subjects (the women in our stories): Silenced/Hidden to Empowered
Object (the content of our exhibit): Misinformation to The Truth
Demographic
- Advocates and Activists
- Policy Makers
- General Public: public opinion drives change
Age Groups:
Storyboard
Created by Moe Aguilar
Further Ideation
Core Ideas
- The truth
- Educating the public
- One story that has been lost/hidden - voice grows and cuts off
- Book bannings
- Two sides of the story
- Showing how history can be manipulated
- Watered down version/misinformation vs real story
- Racial profiling - police radio vs real history
- Inventions - commercials/what became of it vs the real beginnings
Demonstration
Created by Joy Lim
Initial trials
Deciding a theme
The team agreed upon using the erasure of women's contributions in history as the underlying theme of the exhibit.
We also decided to incorporate a digital, AR segment to the installation alongside the physical one we had planned.
The following exhibit is modelled for Marie-Anne Lavoisier's work falling under the shadow of Antoine Lavoisier's.
Finalized model showing two interconnected stories
User can adjust the waves physically using interactions on the AR app
Installation Plans
(This was just a practice pitch assignment. We had an imaginary 2 millian dollar budget to work with and the ability to choose any site in DC, with reasonable explanation!)
- Physical exhibit at the National Archives Museum
- Digital AR and audio component as part of DC's many sightseeing tour guide packages
We have highlighted some places related to Women's history, which would be ideal locations where we could pitch this to tours that include them.
