Dong Ho: The sound of colours

I designed a hands-on, interactive exploration into Đông Hồ village's 500-year-old printmaking craft, with creative use of technologies to recreate the unique sounds from the village.

Here's the magic: As the user places a woodblock on an inkpad, there comes a sound from the artisanal process of making that ink colour - the sound of leaves, the sound of a hammer shattering blocks of red earth into tiny pieces, of seashells and more. This is possible with an electronic setup using a Makey Makey derivative and a DFPlayer MP3 Mini Module.

Those sounds, once heard only by visitors to the village, can now be experienced from far away. The result is a delightful multi-dimensional cultural experience, inviting visual, tactile as well as auditory senses of the user and renewing the forgotten craft in the eyes of young people.