When you move from one place to another, your friends usually don’t fit in your suitcase – no matter how compactly you pack. We all know the feeling that it becomes harder to maintain a friendship across great distances. Phone calls and messages do help, but they’re often not enough to share all those little moments of everyday life with one another. And as you gradually start a new life in your new home, the people you’ve left behind can sometimes fade into the background.
This experience led us to ask: How can we incorporate shared experiences into long-distance friendships and thereby strengthen the sense of closeness and connection?
With Tunie, we developed an interactive recording device that allows users to capture small auditory moments from everyday life and then combine them into a shared song – a fun, spontaneous and carefree way of staying connected.
Through several rounds of prototyping, we explored the form factor and interaction. We found that a more human, personalised design strengthens the connection to the object. This is how Tunie came to have its unique facial expressions. The device’s stationary unit is modelled on a body onto which various modular heads can be placed – each head representing a friend.
It was particularly fascinating to realise that the small images of friends create a deeper sense of closeness. Composing together strengthens the bond, as friends do not merely listen to one another passively, but actively become part of each other’s experiences – because every friendship sounds different.
