Precedents

Describe theory, concepts, and research you have performed. Describe the prior work, ideas and projects that influenced your design. What work informed this idea.

This project was inspired by the work of David Bishop in the 1990s with his idea of the marble answering machine and the more recent invention by Jordi Parra called the Spotify Box. Both inventions seek to embed physical experiences in commonplace digital interactions. The marble answering machine (shown below) works as follows: when a voice message is received, the machine releases a marble into a groove (Image B). Each message is coded to a particular colored marble. To play the message, the user places the particular marble on a small depression (Image D) and can immediately stop the playback by removing the marble. “Users can either keep messages by holding on to the marbles (Image E), or delete them by putting the marbles back into the answering machine through a hole (Image F).” (Charlier, 2015) In this way, messages are made physical through their connection with a particular marble. This approach to an answering machine not only improves the recollection of messages, but also happens to be very intuitive and easy to operate.