The Ambient Sole: A Digital Engagement Project

"The Ambient Sole" is a digital project that invites users to engage with the world that surrounds them. As human lives become busier and busier, the simple mechanical processes of our ambient environment fade into the subconscious only to be recalled during a disrupting or uncanny experience. "The Ambient Sole" seeks to cause these disruptions by adding sound to the footstep, taking away its quotidian properties and calling one's surroundings into the forefront of consciousness. As users step onto this mat, they are entering into a rhetoric of spaces where they are allowed to shape their environment just as much as their environment shapes them. Using this simple kit, users will be able to create a nondescript floor mat that is programmable with up to 12 MP3s to create unique and fun experiences for all who walk past.

The sounds of students moving through the hallways are an everyday part of the college environment—an essential, if often unnoticed, element in the milieu of the academy. To those who travel through the corridors, the sounds of students' movement are an afterthought, a singly repetitive noise among many they may hear in the commotion between classes. Footsteps are a subtlety of college hallways, and when combined with other elements, such as temperature and airflow, they create a ubiquitous ambient environment experienced daily by members of the academy. However, disruption through a sudden and drastic change in one or more elements can call the ambience of the environment to the forefront of consciousness. Disruptions may occur via shifts in temperature, lighting quality or, as we argue: a surprising sound emerging from an unexpected place. It is this special circumstance, the disruption of mobility through sound, to which the Ambient Sole speaks, asking, "What happens when the everydayness of one's movement through space is disrupted?"

To answer this question we designed and constructed a digital engagement piece, the Ambient Sole, that takes the form of an inconspicuous floor mat. The quotidian nature of the mat's aesthetic sets the stage for the interruption of one's environment as s/he moves through space. Beneath the mat's surface lies a series of pressure sensors connected to an Arduino microprocessor, which is coded to play an MP3 file each time a sensor is triggered. Participants may trigger different sounds for each individual sensor, and with each step collisions between human and nonhuman bodies elicit new disruptions in the ambient environment. These disruptions disturb movers' activity and provide opportunities to contemplate the elicitation of sound through their contact with the mat, which was until that moment just another part of the environment. In disrupting ambient environs, the Ambient Sole reveals both the human and non-human agency of spaces that shape our everyday lives.