Story Drawer – Show it an Object and It’ll Tell You a Story

The Story Drawer MP3 player is a curious device I found on BoingBoing this morning.

When you place an object on top of it the Story Drawer detects its presence with RFID and tells a story.

The brains behnd the drawer, inventor Matthew Simpson, says:

Story Drawer has been designed as a counter to the current culture of products with heavy emphasis on the technology. I believe interactions with products should be more evocative and less convoluted. Story Drawer reflects this by combining refreshingly eloquent function with clean and refined aesthetics.

Each story takes the form of an audio track on a usb flash drive and each audio track is associated with an RFID tag. The artefacts have a tag attached to them and when they are placed upon Story Drawer an RFID Reader recognises the tag and tells the MP3 device to play the appropriate track from the usb flash drive.

It appears that one is in use at the Fisheries Museum in Anstruther.

Check out the flickr gallery charting its development.