The Sound of Smart Things

Networked smart things are part of everyday environments, yet what they do, and how they relate, mostly goes unnoticed. Sound does not need to be seen to be heard: it can stay in the background or move into focus. TSOST investigates sound as a design material for distributed systems of smart things. It asks what role sound can play in such systems, and what designing for it reveals about how the digital and the physical meet. It designs and builds autonomous, sensing, networked, and sound-producing devices with TESI, a modular toolkit built to explore these questions, and reflects on them as a family.