Jónófón
2012In 2012 I graduated as a Product Designer from IUA. My graduation project was a turntable made out of paper and plywood, called Jónófón.
It was a flat-pack product where the user was to gain an understanding of basic sound physics while assembling it - because we use so many things in our lives that we do not understand or know how work. I wanted to strip it down and make the turntable’s functionality visual and understandable.
The turntable only used electricity to turn the record. It amplified the music without electricity, using the same methods as the gramophones did, using a vibrating membrane into a horn - in my case, the bottom of a paper coffee cup attached to a horn made out of paper. The reason for the choice of materials is that at this time the selection of turntables (at least in Iceland) was very poor, and what you could buy was mostly made out of plastic. The only apparent reason I found for using plastic when creating a turntable is that plastic is so cheap. So I wanted to see if I could use some other cheap materials that weren’t necessarily typical when it came to creating consumer electronics. Enter paper.
Jónófón appeared in a physics book in Brazil called “Física - Módulo 8”, back in 2013, that was taught in high-schools. Unfortunately they didn’t send me a copy. Maybe I’m famous in Brazil.