2-Cans-and-a-String Technology Updated for Age of Mobility

Remember your childhood days when you and your best friend, who also happened to be your next-door neighbor, spent all night by your bedroom windows, talking through two tin cans attached to a string?

Oh wait, that only happened on TV.

Well, even though your nostalgia is more imagined than real, you can still advance the rudimentary two-cans-and-a-string concept with a refreshed, only slightly higher-tech version. We give you The Can, a project launched on Kickstarter by Monkey Wrench Design.

You can attach The Can to a computer or smartphone, and then talk with family, friends and colleagues through an aluminum can sourced from real food products. The Can features what the team jokingly calls “can-over-IP technology,” which basically boils down to a microphone and speaker stuffed inside the can’s empty chamber.

The device comes in two basic flavors: tomato paste and creamed corn. The team uses tomato paste cans to make The Can Mini, and creamed corn cans to make a larger device, The Can Club Community. The Can Mini attaches to mobile devices through the headphone jack, while the larger can attaches to computers via USB.

“It’s fun and silly. It’s trying to take this old technology, that we all are familiar with and have some nostalgia for, and couple it with new technology to make it active and exciting,” Edwin Wood, Monkey Wrench Design co-founder, told Wired.

But beyond being a novelty toy, the Monkey Wrench team also considers The Can an artistic and social statement.

“In thinking about our dependence with cellphones and how we interact with our devices, our idea is to make people talk more instead of staring at their phones,” Wood said. “The ethos behind it is to make people interact a little more. And the nice thing is it’s still all based around technology.”

The Can is available in a few editions on Kickstarter. You can get a fully assembled mini version for $25, and a larger version for $37. If you’re the crafty type, Monkey Wrench Design is also selling DIY kits for $17 and $29, respectively.

We’ve tried The Can. It works. It may be little more than Pet Rock for the year 2012, but hey, the Pet Rock didn’t even move.