In this workshop participants join design writer and maker Dr. Jane Norris to design and build listening devices. The devices will enhance hearing, helping pick up signals and capture everyday sounds travelling in the air, that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

There will be a short introduction in which we look at examples of hearing devices from history. These include 18th century hearing trumpets, coastal early warning sound dishes for detecting aircraft, acoustic mirrors, and Gramophone horns. There will be a demonstration of effective ways of making forms from the materials provided, and examples available to inspire making.

The workshop itself will be in two parts: a studio-based making session and a fieldwork session to test what we have built in the Watermans neighbourhood. Participants will be encouraged to use their mobile phones to record the sounds amplified through the devices and following this, there will be time to describe and play back the captured sounds.

About Dr. Jane Norris

Dr Jane Norris is Associate Professor of Creative and Digital Culture at Richmond University. Her design theory focuses on posthuman approaches to materiality, in order to better understand our relationship to materials and making. She runs workshops at international design conferences and contributed to ‘Radical Ventriloquism: Acts of speaking through and speaking for’ at the London Conference in Critical Thought 2019. Her article ‘Listening to Materials to co-design in the Anthropocene’ is published in the June edition of ITERATIONS Design Research and Practice Review.

These workshops are part of Air Matters: Learning From Heathrow is an exhibition and programme of events that explores the politics of air.