The Whistle Has to Be With You
An emergency whistle has a placement problem as well as a sound problem. It can only attract attention if someone has it close enough to use.
That is the practical appeal of Phase Free, a Japanese approach to designing goods and services that work in ordinary life and remain useful in an emergency. The Phase Free Association asks designers to consider those situations together. An object someone already carries may be easier to reach than one packed away for a future they hope will never arrive.
For Taiwan and Japan, where earthquakes make preparedness an ongoing concern, the idea raises a useful design question: what makes a person keep an emergency function near them before they need it?
Left: effe alphabet / Right: effe pensiero. Photo / Tokowaka.
The whistle you choose to carry
Rescue Whistle effe comes from Sabae, Fukui Prefecture, a center of Japan’s eyewear industry. Plus Jack, an eyewear workshop, applied its knowledge of cellulose acetate, cutting and polishing to a small whistle with the appearance of an accessory.
According to the company, the project began with a question from Sabae’s disaster-prevention office. Conventional whistles could end up at the bottom of a bag. Could a whistle become something people would willingly wear? The design problem concerned habit as much as shape.
Cellulose acetate, familiar from eyeglass frames and partly derived from plant material, offered a way to work with color and finish. The collections make different uses of it: candy pairs two-tone colors with a matte surface; bottle prism uses facets; alphabet incorporates the sound channel into letter forms.
The appearance is meant to encourage everyday carrying, whether worn or attached to belongings. The intended use includes calling for attention in an emergency or an unexpected personal-safety situation. That purpose depends on the whistle remaining within reach.
The sound still has to do its job
effe’s published sound information describes a design developed with the 2–5 kHz range in mind, which the brand identifies as easier for the human ear to detect. It also reports at least 85 dB in a five-second average noise measurement conducted under the guidance of an industrial testing facility. The company aims for a high-pitched sound produced with little breath.
The five-second average is part of the reported result. It is not a maximum loudness rating or a promise about every user’s output. Appearance addresses the carrying problem; sound design addresses a separate requirement. The object needs both.
The compact designs contain distinct sound channels. Photo / Tokowaka.
A bowl asks a different preparedness question
SanYoshi, an Aizu lacquerware company, approaches the subject through washing. Its wider range includes dishwasher-compatible and microwave-compatible tableware, but Rakupika has a specific development history.
A Japan Patent Office profile describes how difficulty washing dishes in water-scarce shelters after the Great East Japan Earthquake led the company to develop Rakupika with a coatings manufacturer. The synthetic lacquerware uses a water-repellent coating to help remove dirt and oil with less water.
The connection is concrete: a limitation encountered in a shelter became a product-development problem. It is a feature of Rakupika, rather than an emergency-use benefit that can be assigned to lacquerware in general.
Two kinds of tatami, with different jobs
Tatami illustrates why the product’s actual purpose matters. Ito En’s Sarari Tatami reuses tea leaves from beverage production in tea-blended boards. The company describes reduced timber use and deodorizing properties associated with green tea. For a six-mat room using its Type I product, it gives a tea-leaf equivalent of approximately 3,000 600 mL bottles of Oi Ocha.
Those are properties of a household flooring material. They do not establish how it performs in an emergency.
Tatami no Kouhin’s disaster-preparedness tatami is a separate product made for emergency bases and evacuation shelters. Its bordered half-mat model uses foam and fiber insulation board in the core, with a lightweight design intended to ease installation. It should not be confused with Ito En’s tea-leaf product.
Start with the job, then the object
A whistle kept on a key ring, a dish designed to wash with less water and a mat supplied for a shelter answer different needs. A recycled household material has another value again. The connection to preparedness comes from the particular design and its intended use.
effe makes the Phase Free idea especially easy to grasp because the ordinary action and the emergency function meet in one decision: taking the whistle with you. The most consequential detail may be neither its color nor its measured sound. It may be that, on an ordinary morning, you remember it because it is already part of what you carry.
Source：
effe: sound design and measurement conditions