Feb 01, 2010Many people create playlists on their MP3 devices to suit their different moods. Matt Brown, a design student at Sweden's Umeå Institute of Design, took the concept further by putting RFID tags in paper-cut radio sculptures to trigger specific playlists. "I was trying to create an interesting, physical experience that sometimes is missing with digital music," he says. "I think it would be fun having these things on your shelf and using them to change your music."
Brown built the prototype in Umeå's interaction lab. "It has a lot of RFID chips and readers to mess around with, as well as a laser cutter to create the sculptures," he says. Brown placed RFID transponders in the low-cost paper sculptures, and connected an RFID reader's output port to an MP3 player. He programmed the MP3 to play a particular song or launch a playlist when it reads a tag's unique serial number. When a sculpture is placed over the MP3, it triggers the device to play specific music. "I imagined that people would have collections of the radios," he says. Each sculpture would come with preprogrammed tags.
The project was a test for a job interview. While Brown didn't land the job, he hopes the concept will catch on. He envisions different artists designing sculptures—they could be radios or anything else—and developing the playlists they call. If devices such as iPhones eventually have built-in RFID readers, they could be programmed to play certain sets of songs based on the tags they read.
Brown admits he could use some help commercializing the concept. "I'm good at coming up with ideas and developing the aesthetics of things," he says. "But when it comes to setting up a business, or thinking about how to really get the system working and how to start selling them, I'm as green as it gets."