New York 2015: layout student Maxime Loiseau has designed a set of prototype headphones that transmit sound by way of printed electronics.
Loiseau, a pupil at the École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (ENSCI) in Paris, created the Roll to Roll Headphones utilizing a technique of the same identify.
Roll-to-roll processing – also acknowledged as net processing, reel-to-reel processing or R2R – is a approach of making electronic devices on a roll of flexible plastic or metal foil. It requires printing complex circuits manufactured from thin-movie transistors and other elements onto substrates.
Loiseau’s headphones use these printed circuits instead of wires to streamline the design and reduce the sum of components necessary to create every earpiece.
“We’re working with simplified aspects, efficient components and processes, in which technologies is frequently the material itself, rather than an assemblage of material,” mentioned Loiseau.
The headband and casing for the earpieces are formed from a steady plastic strip, which is laser reduce from a flat sheet. Two layers of the material encase and protect the remainder of the elements.
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Every earpiece comprises eight factors, like foam, netting, thermoformed plastic, a metal hoop, thermo-welded tabs and the speaker.
The latter is based around a piezoelectric cell – which moves in accordance to electrical signals – that vibrates a plastic sheet held in location by a rigid frame.
The speaker generates sound comparable to typical headphones, despite the fact that the plastic surface is only a single millimetre thick.
By minimizing the variety of moving elements and simplifying the assembly, Loiseau hopes that the types will be much more tough and less difficult to create.
“Roll to roll enables you to be very effective with material utilised and processes,” the designer said. “Every thing can be developed on the exact same manufacturing line. The undertaking is a reflection on the economic system of processes, resources and implies in electronic products production.”
Loiseau has also taken the opportunity to revisit the visual layout of the headphones, so their aesthetic displays their production and assembly.
Embossed controls on the side of a single earpiece permit the consumer to play, pause and manage the volume of the track. A power button is situated on the opposite ear.
“This simplicity is observed in the style and composition of the object,” Loiseau explained. “Elements of the object turn into indicators, legible, like a graphic composition. It is to check out how these techniques influence the formal vocabulary of the object, manufactured of strata, and superimposed layers.”
Variations of the prototype have been showcased at Wished Design and style Brooklyn during NYCxDesign – New York’s annual layout festival – earlier this month.