The Sounds
of Items
A cassette-bound AR book that lets international students hear the memories held inside their everyday objects.
Description
Young Frequent Movers move cities often, and the things they carry — a childhood toy, a worn pair of shoes, a pair of scissors — quietly hold years of daily use. This project asks whether those traces can become a medium for belonging.
Audience — young frequent movers building a new sense of home.
Purpose — establish an emotional connection between a person and the city through the ordinary items they use every day.
The project unfolds across three touchpoints: an AR poster that reacts to a scanned item, a website where users submit and classify their items, and a physical cassette-bound book that plays back each object's recorded story.
A cassette can't skip forward without a sound of its own — every rewind and replay leaves a little more wear. That's the feeling I wanted this book to have: not a clean archive, but a record that ages with the person holding it, one object and one memory at a time.
Inspiration
A cassette records without editing — every play carries the hiss and wear of its own history. That same idea became the project's central metaphor: could a book behave like a tape, storing the sound an object makes and the story behind it?
Classifying by Touch
The traces of use are the way objects speak. I collected everyday objects from my daily life and categorized them according to the marks they have accumulated through use. Scratches, wear, fading, and deformation become visual records of time, routine, and human interaction, transforming ordinary objects into storytellers of memory and lived experience. Eight everyday objects were sorted into four tactile categories — soft, hard, smooth, rough — the same system users follow when submitting their own items.
AR Poster
Scanning the QR code triggers an AR effect over each item, inviting the viewer to record — and later hear — the story behind it at itemrecorfing.com.
Web
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AR Book
Each submission folds into the accordion spine between two cassette-shell covers — a book that reads like a tape, one item, one trace, one sound per page.