Will Cooper

The World Health organisation recommends that the safe volume level “is below 85dB” (World Health Organisation, 2015) for a duration no longer than eight hours. Many people today exceed this limit, due to factors in their control, such as listening to music and those out of their control, such as noise exposure on a daily commute to work on the London Underground. Furthermore, the invisible nature of sound makes it hard to quantify exactly the effects it has on us.
‘Listen’ contextualises the invisible pollutant noise, through visualising day-to-day sounds we hear. Listen presents the propagation of noise and its ranging harmful impacts on the activity of human or animal life. The project therefore aims to not only open our eyes to the current issue but also our ears in the hope of promoting change in the way we produce and engage with various sounds around us.

ZERO, a research and participatory exhibition project explores how we can find and contextualises silence in today’s ‘age of noise.’ ZERO aims to generate awareness resolving the crisis we are in, whereby technological advancement is homogenising and directing our behaviour, whilst causing addiction and consuming our happiness. This is achieved through a book and short video titled ‘A Codified Mission’ displaying the viscous cycle of human and machine communication. In response to this, ZERO presents a way-finding system to aid the user in finding their silence today. Silence is understood in this project as not ‘nothing’, but everything that makes an individual truly happy. Therefore, the meaning of silence today and its potential in the context of design is used within a way-finding system to promote others to find their silence. The project hopes that through de-homogenising behaviour and promoting individuality it will provide the viewer with what truly makes them happy.

A Codified Mission is a publication and short film both found within ZERO, which both seek to demonstrate human-machine communication today, through our deep reliance upon technology. As a result, presenting humans seamless connection with machines, which in turn breads addiction. Half of the publication printed on a gloss paper stock shows the continuous flow of imagery displayed and selected not by the designer, but by the leading search engine (and machine), Google. This elucidates the power of the machine. Disrupting each page and the continuous flow of imagery are the thoughts and inputs of the designer/human in this search. This is marked by a change in paper and its size (a smaller, matte and off-white paper stock). This part of the book demonstrates that the continuous suggestions of the machine relinquishes our powers as humans to think independently.

‘Lost In Leeds’ is an exploration of the psychological and physiological feelings, reactions and expressions of someone who is lost in an expansive city. All imagery, text and digital content within the book are inspired and taken from the industrial city of Leeds, in northern England. In an innovative form, the book upholds multiple layers of varying size, weight and transparency on which varied imagery and text are placed to increase the sense of confusion and disorientation to the reader. Something an individual would feel when lost. The book also contains many hidden elements to allow the reader to discover certain imagery and text for themselves as if they were lost and looking for something.