Acheulean Lab

Abstract

Origins: The Acheulean /əˈʃuːliən/ Handaxe is a cordiform biface stone tool manufactured by ancient humans across Africa, Europe, and Asia during the Lower and Middle Pleistocene. In use for over a million and a half years, from 1.7 to 0.1 Mya without revision, the Acheulean Handaxe is the most prolific designed object in history. Despite global distribution, the function of these artifacts is not known. It is unclear if the tool was used for its blade, as an object of ceremony, to convey status or worth, or served some function not yet imagined. The razor-sharp circumference yields an unwieldily edge, hinting that the handaxe purpose was more than pragmatic. The only certainty is the consistency of its form and technique of manufacture.

The Acheulean Handaxe is the origin of design; an object produced with intent through inherited cultural knowledge and technical skill. A constant presence in human lives for over a million years, this most simple object - a sharpened stone - still holds mystery. How absurd that we have managed to forget the purpose of something important enough to remember for a million years. Acheulean Lab pays homage to this universal human artifact and views it as both the archetype for successful design and a symbol of our shared human experience.

Actant Systems

Systems or objects which affect and respond

RoomTone

What if the background noise of daily life was all in tune?

RoomTone is a new approach to conditioning the soundscape that makes any setting feel less exhausting or disturbing. Instead of drowning out the environment with noise cancelation, RoomTone identifies the musical notes embedded in ambient noise, and synthesizes a harmonizing chord to unify dissonant sounds and mask disturbing ones. RoomTone facilitates attention, reflection, empathetic listening, and deep reading.

RoomTone is live to demo at RoomTone.xyz.

Sounds define how a place feels. The noises around us are distinct and disconnected, and rarely fit together neatly. At their core, all ambient noises contain musical notes. Workplaces click clack in D. Engines rumble in G flat and traffic is perforated with the Fs of a honk. Washing machines drone at A, and a microwave hums along at E flat. RoomTone breaks down a soundscape into its frequency components, and identifies a single note that sits at the middle and brings them together into a unified chord. RoomTone removes only dissonance from a soundscape, negating unpleasant noises while preserving our environment. Dissonant sounds are salient and hard to ignore; they produce a sense of unease or tension. Like a composer reinterpreting an existing piece of music, RoomTone rearranges the content of a soundscape, so the jarring dissonant sounds fade away.

The project stemmed from a curiosity about how sensory inputs alter perceptions of our environment, and how they could be manipulated. RoomTone was shaped by conversations with psychoacousticians, composers, anthropologists, and psychologists and informed by study of many field recordings of daily life: the sounds of appliances, traffic, and household tasks. Recordings were analyzed for their dominant tones, and the typical frequency range of common disturbing sounds was identified. RoomTone genrates sounds with a custom synth engine. The order of events within the signal processing logic is mapped above.

RoomTone is a part of the soundscape, and it can be embedded in a hardware artifact. Hardware helps distribute the output sound across a room, so it feels connected to a space rather than like a layer on top.

Sound Software

Subambient

Passive, plastic free, biodegradable. A planet-centric cooling material for emergency heatwave protection.

Subambient is a working prototype for a frugal and nontoxic emergency-ready cooling solution for agriculture or structures, that removes heat from Earth's surface entirley. As global temperatures rise and cooling demand threatens to accelerate climate change, Subambient offers an alternative: a passive, electricity-free cooling material that removes heat from Earth’s surface by emitting it through the atmosphere to outer space. Subambient becomes colder than surrounding air—even in direct sunlight—by reflecting solar radiation and emitting infrared light through the atmospheric window. Initial prototypes achieved 5 degrees Centigrade below ambient temps.

Subambient is a biodegradable, plastic-free composite. It is formed from precisely milled spherical calcium carbonate (derived from eggshells) suspended in cellulose nanofibers grown from bacteria. These same materials are found in common organic fertilizers. Subambient is lightweight, disposable, and leaves no trace.

This concept was developed at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in colaboration with P. Poss, T. Belousko, and S. Wang.

Material Speculative

Seeshell

A shelfish-powered ocean health monitor to preserve culture in a changing world.

Seeshell is a biocentric ocean health monitor that reinforces the human connection to the marine environment. Seeshell demonstrates the ability of clams and mussels to purify the ocean, but reminds us that human cooperation is required. Seeshell tracks the motion of clams and mussels to measure water contamination in realtime: in the presence of high levels of contaminants bivalves close their shells. Seeshell's glass enclosure introduces a new point of exchange with aquatic life; as commercial fishing fades to tourism and climate change threatens fisheries Seeshell expresses the tangible value of native species if cultivated and helped to flourish.

Seeshell hosts a colony of shellfish (bivalves) in a transparent enclosure, installed at intertidal zones. Each installation is raised a meter from the ground, supported by a tower tailored to provide habitat for local species. A pile of stones offers crabs shelter from seabirds or a textured pillar lends mussels a perch to bite. Hidden pipes draw fresh seawater into the enclosure, circulating the colony with nutrients and particulate. The device observes the level of local seawater pollution through the technique of valvometry: the monitoring of clam and mussel shell motion as they open or close to provide cover from water contaminants.Through a computer-vision system Seeshell observes changes to water quality, such as presence of harmful chemicals like excess fertilizers. A network of sensors along a coastline provides real-time and historic information about local conditions, serving as an early warning for sewage or agricultural contamination. This information is charted to an online map, and made accessible to the public. Seeshell can be used to track changing water conditions remotely, or verify in person if the water at a beach is safe for swimming, fishing, or wading.

The town of Poole, England was the inspiration for this project and basis for ethnographic field work and literature analysis. This proposal comes in response to several large seawater contamination events along the Southeast Coast of England, and the observation that as Poole’s economy drifts away from the seafood industry an important cultural history fades from daily life. This project was the outcome of a collaboration between the Royal College of Art and the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution), seeking new futures for coastal communities.

Speculative Interaction

Transmission Tube

A bookshelf speaker enclosure designed to support small drivers, without resonance spikes.

This transmission line speaker enclosure was designed around Peerlees TC55FD00-08 drivers, selected because of their compact 2-inch footprint and remarkably flat frequency response. The length of the transmission line enclosure was specifically tuned to extend the driver’s low-frequency performance, enhancing bass output and extending the flat response falloff point from 120 Hz down to approximately 80 Hz. This project is currently being manufactured, to test performance and refine the design.

Transmission line enclosures are not as common as the ubiquitous sealed or ported box cabinet. TLs are often larger and more complex to manufacture out of wood sheets (though not with 3d printing or injection molding), but they stand out for their natural, full-bodied sound. Sealed cabinets restrict bass and ported enclosure tend to suffer from unwanted resonance spikes, akin to the droning note produced by blowing across the top of a bottle. Air moves freely through a transmission line, like blowing into a straw. TL designs avoid resonance peaks and support bass by routing the air from the back of the driver through a long, damped pathway which turns back in parallel with the speaker driver. High frequencies are muted but low frequencies are able pass freely, boosting the low end performance.

Above: The Peerlees TC55FD00-08 driver frequency reproduction starts to fall off around 120hz. This transmission line was designed around a 100hz wave, which corresponds to a wavelength of 3.43 meters. 1/4 of the target wavelength is the typical transmission line length, accordingly this enclosure is 0.8575 meters long (about 2.8 feet). By wrapping the transmission line back and forth a tight package was achieved, which became the dominant feature of the design language. The enclosure is about 7 inches deep and 10 inches tall.

Above: This design would ideally be injection molded, but a prototype was 3d printed for analysis. The performance was tested by measuring frequency response curves from 50 Hz to 10k Hz. When compared against the driver without an enclosure (baffle-less) the transmission line increased the response at 120 Hz by 4dB, from -20 dB to -16 dB. and by 3db at 100hz. Next iterations will explore the impact of various internal acoustic damping materials to reduce added treble, and variations in transmission line length to attempt further low end boost.

Material Sound

Frameworks

Systems for building

Sonic Playground

How to visualize ambient sound?

A custom platform for sharing spatial audio concepts

Sonic Playground is a web-based interactive spatial audio system for visualizing and manipulating spatialized sound. Using real-time face tracking (MediaPipe + TensorFlow.js) and a compass-inspired UI, users can interact with virtual sound sources through intuitive head movements or direct manipulation.

View the project

Sandbox Mode: users place and control a sound source freely. Scene Mode: animated sources move through the ambient environment.

Software Sound Learning How

Contact Galleries

What if a catalog organized itself?

A Searchable Photo Archive Built with ML Image Segmentation

A minimalist archive for a personal photography collection. A script processes and formats folders of images into a layout inspired by film contact sheets (thumbnails from the analog era), making large collections easy to skim through. A SegFormer ML model, trained on architectural images, is used to automatically identify the content of each photo and generate labels to describe common features. A list of lables (and synonyms) is queried by user search, and corresponding images are displayed.

View the project

Software Learning How

Graphic Standard 001

Layout guidelines for a nonprofit's print communication.

Layout, fonts and colors for a grant proposal. Based on client specification to pitch a maker space as a valuable and accessible community hub.

Graphic

Sheet Cleat

Sheet metal bulletin board.

A minimalist take on Victorian molding. A sheet of steel, bent to form a spring clip holds artwork, postcards or photos against the wall. Bulkier objects rest in the pocket above. Each section of cleat is 18 inches long, and multiple can be assembled to cover long walls. Temporary storage for paper hoarders and graphic designers, inspired by a very cluttered junk drawer.

Material

Reoriented Strand Board

A new visual language for wood composites. How might wood composites be reconfigured to shed preconceptions and make them more compelling to architects, designers, and builders?

Oriented Strand Board (OSB) is a wood composite commonly used in construction and furniture, manufactured by compressing wood chips with adhesive under high temperature and pressure. Challenging perceptions of OSB as a lesser material, RSB (Reoriented Strand Board) refines the aesthetic character of wood composite and reconnects users to the material’s origin with an embedded grain structure reminiscent of natural hardwood. Dyed strands are scattered, aligned, and bonded into the material to form swirling patterns. RSB amends the surface of OSB with a clear motif, creating an opportunity for architects, designers, and makers to celebrate the materiality of wood composites in the same way they might hardwood.

The primary goal of this project was to validate that large-particle patterns could be formed with cymatic vibration. By verifying that aesthetically pleasing grain-like patterns can be assembled and bonded with an automated process the potential to integrate RSB in design and construction through mass manufacture was confirmed.

Cymatic vibration was identified as a simple and flexible method to form patterns. Cymatics is an area of research that examines waves and their visual expressions through the acoustic vibration of particles (typically sand or salt) across the surface of a resonant sheet. Experiments were conducted to test both the feasibility of generating cymatic patterns with large particles (detailed below), and to integrate cymatics into composite material production. To create RSB a pattern was generated by vibrating dyed wood particles, which was then layered with adhesive and contrasting wood material, and pressed until solid.

Material Sound

Cam Bench

How can something seldom used become something useful?

Cam Bench is a furniture set that creates utility from the state of being in storage. Cam Bench repurposes objects, material, tools, and scraps as utilities. A pair of triangular legs act as a fixture for a bench or coffee table, providing a sturdy base to support seats made of ladders, brooms and mops, leftover construction materials, and anything else too important or sentimental to throw out. The legs secure a seat without tools or fasteners, simply by rotating into place; to make building accessible to non-builders, and to avoid modifications to supplied material. Potential user-supplied seat materials include: cardboard boxes, fence posts, sticks and yard trimmings, books and paper, boats and oars, camping equipment, car parts, broken furniture, pallets, bodies. Households accumulate clutter, storage fills up. We hold artifacts, materials, and tools for their nostalgic value, potential future need, or their expected but infrequent use. Could these utilities be preserved without taking up space?

Material Interaction

Non-Graphic Interfaces

Alternative Human-Computer interactions

Rockbell

Replace a button with a mindful act.

Instigate interaction with natural materials in the built environment. Rockbell is a new form of interface that calls attention to mundane actions. Strike one rock with another to trigger a ring; the act of arrival becomes a meditative and restorative experience. Rockbell is a respite from technology and mass-manufactured materials; a more fulfilling sensory experience that feels like an escape to nature. Rockbell was inspired by Florence Williams’s The Nature Fix (which details the myriad of benefits that come from exposure to the outdoors) and the overly digital world of the remote days of covid-19.

Sound Interaction

Sonic Thermometer

Listen to your body.

How does the practice of healthcare change when we emphasize sensory information over absolute measurements and values? This thermometer reminds the user to pay close attention to signals from their body, and that sickness and health are more than binary. This device produces two tones, one effected by the user’s temperature. The device is tuned so a healthy temperature will align the two sound waves and a slight fever will prevent the tones from synchronizing. Place device to forehead and listen (closely) to your body.

Speculative Sound

Unclassified Experiments

Intercom

A micro vocal effects box to accompany portable synthesizers. Initial desing developed for the Teenage Engineering 10 years of Pocket Operator PO10DIY Contest.

For home MCing, Djing like a NTS host, or mixing tracks on the go. A working prototype was developed with a microphone module, modified echo circuit with adjustable speed and depth, and an internal voltage regulator.

Sound Interaction

Acheulean Lab ASCII Playground

Custom ASCII generator. Create your own artwork!

A web-based ASCII art generator that converts images to ASCII text with "Acheulean Lab" characters and colors. Try it HERE.

Software Graphic

Faceless Slip

Transparent armor, delicate impermeability.

A sheer and near weightless slip dress, made of Dyneema (ultra high molecular weight polyethylene): a fully waterproof composite material, stronger than steel by weight. The slip was stitched and seam taped, and though the wearer is visually exposed they are fully insulated from outside forces and conditions.

Material Learning How

Fishcase

Making the mundane absurd. Flexible rubber case for glasses.

Interaction