Inspired Furniture
America’s Mixtape was a semester-long collaboration between Engineering and Humanities classes. The broad goals of this project were to conduct a critical look at social, political, and economic conditions throughout U.S. History by way of the music inspired by them, as well as to employ the engineering process to create phone-powered multimedia devices. At the exhibition of our work, students utilized these devices to share a “mixtape” of songs that were remixed to highlight contemporary connections with their original purposes; this listening experience was presented alongside an anthology of related historical fiction at the Logan Heights Public Library.
During the course of this project students were asked to think critically about social issues that are important to them, consider how artists, specifically musicians, have served as voices for their communities, develop & utilize technological skills related to audio production, craft authentic historical fiction, and employ engineering practices in effective & creative ways.
At the outset of America’s Mixtape, students were introduced to the basic methods, tools & technologies of engineering to develop a foundation for the design and build aspects that would be required by the later stages of the project. At the same time, they developed a familiarity with audio editing software by remixing one of their favorite songs into an autobiographical representation of their self. With these fundamentals in place, students worked to identify & understand the significance of a specific song from U.S. history by conducting focused academic research to appropriately contextualize it as a product of the social, economic & political circumstances of a particular era.
With a deep understanding of the songs they chose, each student authored an authentic historical fiction piece that creatively appropriated lyrics from the song it was based on. The anthology of these stories is available [here]. Each student also engineered a remix of their song by introducing primary sources and other supplementary audio enhancements to the artist’s original work. The aggregate of these remixes was compiled to function as America’s Mixtape, a new & inventive presentation of these familiar songs arranged to catalyze thinking toward important issues from U.S. History and their relevance today. This playlist is available online [here].
Finally, to share this work with our community, students collaborated with several of their classmates to design, prototype, construct and test a multimedia device, powered by their own cell phones, that had the ability to play the remixed songs and project related images. These devices were utilized at the exhibition of our work, which was well-received by the community members in attendance.