Victor Szilagyi is an Interaction designer. He holds a degree in Psychology and Urban Design Studies from NYU and a masters degree from The Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
What if you could leave a message for a place instead of a person? localHistories proposes an easily deployable system of hacked answering machines to create localized oral history projects.
As partipants dial into the system to deposit stories, each node becomes active. If visitors are too far away, the nodes play all available stories simultaneously at low volume- in essence, replicating the audio qualities of a cocktail party.
When visitors trigger a node's proximity sensor, the node isolates one of the many stories availble, and plays it at an audible level.