Here are the result of a workshop I just did here at the Design Academy with the designer and author Stuart Walker. The starting point for the workshop was to bring in old, but still working electronic goods, bought at second-hand shops or salvaged from the tip. We then had to figure out creative ways to re-contextualize or re-value those products. It was a pretty fun project, perhaps a little silly in some ways, but interesting because it promoted out-of-the-box type thinking.
I worked with my fellow student Hyuan-Taik Lim and mated an old AKAI radio receiver with an old Sony Cassette-Corder. One can receive radio and the other can record and play it back, but you can’t listen in real-time. An interesting ear-brain-memory-mouth relationship. We de-skinned the products and attached a light to create a shadow on the wall, which looked like…. a factory. For me this connected perfectly with my starting point and feelings about the AKAI receiver – a solid durable product made just prior to when the ethics of “built in obsolescence” took off in Japan and other countries. The black plastic decade.