We all experience this warm and loving gesture of a grandma yelling and calling you home for lunch while you are playing outside. This happens almost all over the world, but especially in Costa Rica, where families are big and family gatherings is a right-of-passage. We abstracted our core concept from this.

In addition, we looked into two other human behaviours that fit perfectly. One being – when our parents and grandparents talk louder on a phone call especially when its a long-distance call, thinking the voice would travel better and secondly – back in the day before phones (landline or mobiles) were a thing, in small towns of Costa Rica people would leave messages on the AM radio and everyone on that radio channel would hear it.

These simple interactions people used to have, inspired us to create “Gritofono” (directly translated to yelling phone). It is a network phone that runs on LoRa (Long Range network protocol), and connects you to people based on your talking, shouting or yelling volume of a respective radius. So if you’re yelling, the people in the talk and shout zone will not receive the message.

In our discussions and after talking to a few people, we found out how phones are getting boring and often a target of surveillance from the governments. We thought it’ll be much more interesting to have our neighbour do the surveillance instead of the government. Also, this probed some interesting questions such as, does this new way of communication define where people choose to live? – to be close to family or friends in the ‘talking radius’, or will this encourage people to connect to more people in order to grow their social network?.

How it works?

Use your “yell-o-book” to see where your friend Jose is, adjust the distance of the microphone unit to that level (talk, shout, yell) and talk/shout/yell there name out till they respond back to you and maybe keep it pg13, because the others in the same radius are listening to everything you are saying.

Process

This was a four day project from brainstorming to development. We used various techniques and materials to create the product i.e. wood for the handle and base, laser-cut acrylic joined edge to edge forming the speaker and mic units, and a key on the back that loosens or tightens the mic unit to move it up or down. The mechanics included two LoRa units that transmitted and received the signal, a NeoPixel led ring that changed color based on the distance and connection giving visual feedback to the user.

School: Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design

Class: Connected Objects

Faculty: Nikolaj “Dzl” Møbius, Olivia Prior, Omid Ettehadi & Vanessa Julia Carpenter

Students: Aakash Dewan, Jose Chavarría & Shin Ooi.