Listening in Between
Elida Chen
We design objects to serve our everyday needs, but what if the things we design also quietly reshape who we become?
This thesis examines headphones not simply as listening devices, but as cultural artifacts that influence how we interact with our surroundings. By creating intimate “headphone worlds” within shared spaces, this thesis explores the paradox posed by headphones. As headphones carve out private spaces within public settings, they redefine the ways we listen, communicate, and coexist with others.
Listening in Between asks whether, when we put on our headphones, we are connecting more deeply with our shared world, or moving further away from it. Through a series of interviews and parallel research, this project documents listening experiences through an interactive website, an informative book with visual studies, and fifteen postcard sets. Each set is based on an interviewee’s listening experience and features abstract patterns created from their descriptions of their “headphone world.” Listening volume and years of headphone use are visualized through scales and framing lines, determining each participant's placement in relation to each other on the website.
By translating these listening experiences into visual and physical forms, the project invites reflection on the balance between personal comfort and collective experience in shared environments. It argues that designed objects such as headphones play an active role in shaping how we share space with one another.