Play/Destroy: A portfolio of sound destruction devices

Paper Title

Play/Destroy: A portfolio of sound destruction devices

Publication Info

• Topic area: Exploration of destruction as a design paradigm in digital sound and personal media.
• Keywords: digital media, sound destruction, impermanence, sustainable HCI, annotated portfolio, media decay, personal archives, design research, seamful design, degrowth.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Digital storage systems are inherently unstable, yet current design paradigms in HCI prioritize seamlessness and permanence, leading to unsustainable growth and a bias against deletion. There is a lack of tools that meaningfully engage with the impermanence and destruction of digital media.
• Significance: Addressing the inevitability of digital decay and exploring destruction as a design strategy can reveal new ways to interact with personal media, countering the unsustainable emphasis on accumulation.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in HCI has explored media archiving, deletion, and slow technology, but largely within paradigms that preserve or enhance media. Contemporary art and sound practices have embraced destruction, but these approaches have not been fully integrated into HCI. This paper builds on these foundations to explore destruction as a deliberate, meaningful interaction.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The development of a portfolio of sound destruction devices that combine listening to and destroying digital sound, emphasizing impermanence and loss as core design principles.
• Novelty:
  1. Introduction of a sound destruction engine that links playback with permanent audio decay.
  2. Creation of physical devices (e.g., Memory Boxes) that embody the destruction of personal media.
  3. A seamful design approach that highlights the limitations and impermanence of digital media.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Development of the Sound Destroyer Engine, a Pure Data-based system that introduces glitches into audio playback and overwrites them onto the original file.
  • Iterative prototyping of physical devices, including enclosures with surface transducers, buttons, and lights to facilitate interaction.
  • Integration of ritualized processes for selecting and destroying meaningful personal media, emphasizing user agency and emotional engagement.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • The Sound Destroyer Engine allows for controlled, gradual destruction of audio files, with glitches accumulating until the sound fades to silence.
  • Physical devices like the Memory Boxes enable users to interact with and embody the destruction process, creating a tangible connection to impermanence.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Unlike standard deletion processes, which are seamless and atemporal, these designs make destruction a deliberate, time-based, and embodied experience.
  • The approach challenges the bias toward endless growth and permanence in HCI, offering an alternative paradigm that embraces loss.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • The portfolio was developed through Research through Design (RtD), with iterative prototyping and reflective analysis.
  • Ritualized processes for media selection and destruction were tested by the authors, revealing emotional and conceptual insights into the experience of loss.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The designs are not scalable or practical solutions to media hoarding but serve as conceptual explorations.
  • Future work could expand on destruction-led paradigms, exploring other forms of media and broader applications in HCI.

Summary

This paper presents a portfolio of sound destruction devices that link listening to the gradual, permanent decay of digital audio, challenging the HCI bias toward seamlessness and permanence. By embracing impermanence, the work introduces a seamful design approach that highlights the instability of digital media. The annotated portfolio and accompanying rituals reveal the emotional and experiential dimensions of destruction, offering a counterpoint to the unsustainable growth paradigm in computing. While not a practical solution, this work prefigures alternative design strategies that engage with the inevitability of digital decay.