Can we have screen-less forms of navigation to immerse pedestrians in their surrounding?

The project started with interviews asking a neurodivergent group: how do you remember a route in your head? I quickly noticed that the navigation technology we use on a daily basis is not made to serve people’s way of moving around but to accommodate the needs of wheeled machines.

People are much more imaginative and non-linear, an orienteer can imagine to look through buildings and directly “see” their destination and a dyslexic person remembers routes by counting the bumps on the road. People have different agencies with which they move across cities, yet we all use the singular technology that have become the norm for navigation.

In the process, I was inspired by the book “An immense World - How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us” by Ed Yong, a Pulitzer Prize Winner in explanatory journalism; he writes:

“In order to understand our world; we need to see through other eyes. ”

To follow a strict line on a screen requires a lot of attention. However, humans learn and grow when we move and entangle ourselves with the world in unexpected ways, and we do so best when we are fully engaged participants in that journey, not passive recipients of algorithmic and corporate diktats. To find a more emerging navigation experience, I turned to an animal living in a completely different sensory bubble and a true master of orientation: bats. In collaboration with animal cognition scientists, I was able to better understand their ways in context and make their decision making process experienceable for humans.

The first prototype included literally two paper ears that could be expanded to make human’s auricles bigger and receive more sounds.

I asked people from the interviews in the beginning to try out the device. Their feedback together with my learnings – e.g. the expandable origami structure gave the object an performative aspect, it was not efficient in sound capturing – gave shape to the final object.This first image video of navigational superpowers.

This pair of headphones lets people acoustically navigate themselves around the city so pedestrians can take notice of their surroundings and deviate from the line on Maps services. Akin to echolocation of bats, this wearable heightens humans hearing senses, inviting people to perceive the world beyond the confines of the screen and to experience an intuitional orientation based on directional hearing, volume and the beat.

The wearable is connected to a raspberry pi communicating to a GPS and a compass sensor. When you enter a location, the computer continuously calculates your current position to your destination and outputs sound accordingly. Press the yellow button and start the listening!

After the graduation show, the project was presented at Vienna Design Week, where visitors could try out the headphones.