For 2 days, Saturday August 3rd and Sunday August 4th, 2019., the “Maker Faire Tokyo 2019,” the largest manufacturing festival of Japan, was held at Tokyo Big Sight. Maker Faire is a festival of maker culture that everyone from adults to children can enjoy, and is held across the world. Original artworks derived from unique ideas and new technology are exhibited or demonstrated.
JVCKENWOOD Design Corporation participated in this faire this year, for the third time. At our booth, we exhibited two prototypes utilizing live forest sounds from across Japan, which are distributed through our “Forest Notes,” and demonstrated them in the hope that visitors would rediscover the appeal of forests using their five senses and mind.
This time, many children enjoyed experiences as if they were in the forest through the prototypes that we had created based on our fieldwork held at Minami Alps Village Wild Bird Park in Hayakawa-cho, Yamanashi Prefecture. We thank all the visitors that came to visit our booth.
Prototypes created based on field work experience
The prototypes were designed to simulate what natural forests are like through the senses, based on fieldwork conducted in the Minami Alps Village Wild Bird Park in “Hayakawa-cho,” the least populated town of Japan, which is located on the west end of Yamanashi Prefecture. The ecosystem in “Hayakawa-cho,” where 96% of its land is covered with forest, is a paradise of wildlife and birds, inhabited by more than 100 kinds of birds in the course of a year, including crested kingfishers, golden eagles, rock ptarmigans, blue-and-white flycatchers, and narcissus flycatchers.
During our fieldwork, we conducted observation with the cooperation of experts, and experienced the attraction of the forest by fully using our five senses through activities such as “kikinashi,” which converts cries of birds into human language.
We brainstormed about the way to express this precious experience, then produced two prototypes by using a 3D printer, a laser beam machine, and programming technique: “Forest Echo” which is connected with a mountain by a string telephone to hear the sound of the forest, and “Forest Bird,” a bird-shaped object that reacts to a whistle and turns toward the direction of the sound.
Cooperation: Hayakawa-cho Minami Alps Village Wild Bird Park
Listen to forest sounds, “Forest Echo”
The prototype of “Forest Echo” was connected to a structure likened to a mountain, which is equipped with a vibration speaker, via a string telephone. The sound transmitted through vibrations of a string telephone gives realistic sensation as if the listener is standing in a forest, and expresses our intention to provide an opportunity to feel that a forest is closer. On both days of the exhibition, we were impressed by conversations between parents and children saying “Can you hear birds tweeting?,” “Yes! I heard that!,” and primary school students trying to hear something from a string telephone diligently, as well as the wide smiles on children's faces when they heard the tweet of a bird.
Bird-shaped object that turns toward the direction of a sound, “Forest Bird”
At the “Forest Bird” booth, we focused on the way birds cry while facing each other to claim territory, based on our experience from the fieldwork. Visitors mimicked the cry of a bird by whistling and made the bird object turn around. We had a pleasant experience by seeing many visitors from little children to adults clapping hands or staring at the object curiously when it reacted to a bird call and moved.
