Resonate

Approach: The established headphone culture is one of separation and isolation. In this 1.5 week long project, we wanted to address this culture and support an opposing movement instead geared toward connection and group bonding. To do this, we had to come up with a way to represent ‘connectivity’ visually. We drew from a contemporary source of inspiration – the silent disco. In this dance party, music is streamed solely through individual headphones. At these events, there is usually more than one music station, indicated by a colored light inside the headset. At these silent discos, you can tune in to the same stations as your friends simply by noticing the color of the light from their headphones and matching it. We created a compartment in the back of the headphones to fit an mini LED light. To let the light emanate from the headphones, we covered this compartment with a sandblasted acrylic plate with our logo inscribed on it – the puzzle piece, a universal symbol of connection. 

Accompanying these headphones is an app which helps facilitate group music listening. To decrease the chaos of collaborative playlisting, one person has control of the playlist at a time, approving and rejecting songs suggested by other participants. These playlists and their genre of music determine what color the headphones display, using an internal algorithm to decide on colors.

Conclusion: Resonate does not eliminate the private music experience, which headphones are praised for, but instead it broadens the scope of the private experience. In this way, Resonate helps build stronger connections between people, allowing them to work as a group and to enjoy group activities even from afar. Additionally, this design was voted "most desirable" and "wish it already existed today."