Joshua Barnes' bench stores digital memories in its shadows. Image: Joshua Barnes
The backrest and seat are made up of laser-cut lines that represent hours and the armrest functions as the sundial’s gnomon, casting a shadow onto the bench and floor so sitters can read what time it is. Image: Joshua Barnes
After people tell a story, they're encouraged to take a photo of the distinct shadow, which acts as an identifier for the date and time. Image: Joshua Barnes
The arm of chair acts as the gnomon, indicating what time it is via the sun. Image: Joshua Barnes
The first bench was made for Brighton, but they can be customized for any location. Image: Joshua Barnes
Benches are distinctly analog things. They’re placed in a park or along the street and do their simple job of letting people sit and birds poop on them. But these seats also have a way of inviting stories. You know if the inanimate objects could talk, they’d be able to recount better stories than Forrest Gump himself. Of course, benches can’t speak. But that hasn’t stopped Joshua Barnes from creating a version that comes pretty close. Barnes, a designer based in Brighton, England, has built a sundial park bench that stores digital memories in its shadows.
Each hour’s shadow becomes a key to unlocking a digital time capsule.
This post-digital bench, as Barnes describes it, invites whoever sits down to record themselves telling a story so it can be accessed exactly one year later by a future sitter. The idea is to slow down the typically on-demand process of how we access our digital memories and create the sensation that whoever stumbled upon your story is being let in on a secret no one else knows.
There are two steps to the secret. Passersby sit down on the bench and record a memory on their phone or tablet. They then snap a photo of the intricate shadow cast on the ground by the bench’s cutouts and sundial. The position of the sundial’s shadow is used to create a time stamp, which is then associated with the video the user has taken. A year later, whoever visits the bench can open the app and take a picture using augmented-reality image recognition to access the memory that was left on that day at that hour exactly one year ago. Essentially, each hour’s shadow becomes a key to unlocking a digital time capsule that lasts only briefly.
Barnes explains that there needs to be a certain level of complexity to the shadow so the app can identify points of references to determine exactly which shadow it’s looking at. “Basically, the more complicated the shadow the better,” he says. The backrest and seat is made up of laser cut lines that represent hours and the armrest functions as the sundial’s gnomon, casting a shadow onto the bench and floor so sitters can read what time it is. The bench is hyper site-specific since the longitude and latitude will dictate the angle of the shadows cast. Meaning, a bench designed for Brighton (the location of the first) will look different than a bench created for a park in Seattle.
Someday Barnes would like to see memorial benches, and even gravestones, become fully customizable site-specific pieces of furniture that tie in augmented reality capabilities. This is a way, he says, to allow analog objects to tell meaningful stories that would be otherwise never be told at all. “People always ask questions of what we do with all our digital memories when we pass away, seeing as they such intangible things,” he says. Tying ephemeral digital memories to a permanent, physical object is one way to ensure that they’re never lost. And if it’s cloudy? That’s actually part of it,” he says. “It is a bench that holds all these memories, and it may not be that one can access them all the time. So that eventually when it does happen, it makes it that little bit more meaningful.”
[h/t: Core77]
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