Henry Parkin

Chime is a music therapy intervention in macular degeneration support groups. It is delivered as a numeric memory board game which scales in complexity, and its physicality necessitates group play. The project is a collaboration with 17 members of the Macular Society who each have macular degeneration.

Macular degeneration is the leading cause of irreversible blindness, causing loss of central vision where some peripheral vision can remain.

With macular degeneration, memory is at risk due to diminished signalling to the brain via the eyes and loss of visually dependent activities. Memory is, however, one of the key coping strategies for navigating daily life in blindness.

Through a process of participant observation, focus groups, interviews, prototyping, and experimentation, we arrived at music as a research-backed method of meeting the three aims of the intervention:

exercising working memory, encouraging social cohesion among the support group, and facilitating self-expression through collaboration.

The outcome is a socially engaged outlet for training working memory. It makes some of the therapeutic benefits of music accessible to blind non-musicians via a dynamic alternative to Braille notation, because none of the project collaborators use Braille.

Gameplay is adapted from the musical form of bell ringing, where music is generated by sounding mathematical permutations. This is because bell ringing is an inherently social activity, and it's played by memorising methods for generating each change in musical sequence - making it brilliant exercise for working memory. Pieces of bell ringing music have been adapted to form levels in the game.

The device pictured helps players to navigate levels of increasing difficulty by transposing visual music notation into sequenced vibrations. This allows players to learn new methods for training their working memory by generating music together.

Guerrilla is a highly efficient device meant for membrane-less removal of pollutants from surface water runoff.

30% of all ocean pollution is mobilised by surface water runoff, making it the single largest mobiliser of city pollution into the environment. When it rains, debris of human activity washes away from our impervious built environment and roads. With toxicity comparable to sewage, this runoff is a cocktail of road, tyre, and brake wear, microplastics, toxic hydrocarbons, heavy metals, pathogens etc. and is discharged into water bodies untreated, damaging aquatic ecosystems and human health.

Guerrilla extracts contaminants passively using no membranes, moving parts or electricity and operates at high flow rates and high efficiency, while fitting into the current maintenance regime of cities.

Guerrilla is versatile and retrofittable into various sized existing roadside drains as an array of individual units which can independently perform highly efficient phase separation (98% with simulated runoff) without reducing the throughput capabilities of the roadside drain.

Based on predictive analysis: In a city such as London, with the installation of Guerrilla in just 250 strategic roadside drains, the turbidity of the river Thames can be brought down by 37% at less than the cost of a Toyota Prius.