1) pick up the phone and listen to the instructions
2) dial the year, date, time for your voice message to be delivered
and record your message
3) the phone will ring at the desired time and the message
played back
The probe consists of an old rotary dial phone, Arduino board,
a lot of rewiring, a new bell running on 5V, a laptop underneath
running a “Processing” script and the audio software
Sox (sox.sourceforge.net/) to handle the audio recording and
playback.
“Message to the future” is one of three technology probes forming part of my masters thesis at Malmö University “Exploring slow technology in the home”.
This concept talks to a universal thing that everybody can relate to - the abstract yet concrete feeling of being only a bead on string and the feeling of being part of history and something bigger than your self.
By asking the participants to communicate across time and into the far future, they began to contemplate on their life now, and what life might be like far ahead.
The telephone is a very stationary and not connected object as opposed to the cell phone. As one participant said he really liked that he had to move to the thing instead of the thing following him all the time like the cell phone. Also various participants stated that the messages felt more important and more safe this way instead of having them floating around in the intangible cyberspace.
You can download my masters thesis here