Creating Hope in COVID-19
During the Circuit Breaker in Singapore, many of us felt dejected and pent up being stuck indoors while bad news seemed to flood our devices everyday.
That’s when a team of us at Aleph Labs saw an opportunity to do more.
We saw it as an opportunity to instill hope.
THE PREMISE
Plant a positive spore 🍄
Changing things up
Before I joined the team, they had already kickstarted branding efforts, building the quiz-based web experience and reaching out to potential sponsors.
Yet, they were looking for something beyond the standard web interactions, and that’s when I stepped in.
MY ROLE
Having specialised in Sound Art, I was keen to experiment with sound in the product.
We brainstormed ideas together, but I was ultimately the craftswoman for all things sound and music.
THE TEAM
1 Visionary, 2 Designers, 2 Developers, 3 Happiness Team members
The ideation phase 🔊
We played around with notions of sound based games, drawing inspiration from other web experiments like Patatap and Blob Opera but decided to start with something simple.
We explored how to integrate audio into the pre-existing quiz interactions, and enhance the visual experience.
Here’s a simple demonstration:
Sound as brand 🏷
On top of the use of sound effects to enhance the interactions, I distilled 3 different moods core to the brand – Relaxed, Optimistic and Upbeat.
Taking inspiration from quirky gaming experiences like Sims 1, Donut County and Grow Cube, I sought to reflect ideas of utopia and whimsicality.
Brand moods with their respective tracks and timestamps. Give it a listen below!
What’s next?
This project was discontinued, but it remained a worthy exploration in something more light hearted and experimental.
However, it also highlighted to me that sound is often treated as subservient to image and still isn’t given due credit as a standalone product.
On my mind is to continue exploring its potential as a medium and craft more experiences with greater importance given to sound.