Project overview
This project was executed from September 2018 till January 2019 in a team of four. In social settings in which music is played, usually, someone initiates to play songs that fit the current group vibe. Moods change, and people tend to deviate from the pre-set playlist. However, the contemporary sound systems did not support to create the right atmosphere in which individuals collaborate and feel empowered to arrange the playlist.
After research, user studies and many design explorations through prototyping, a speaker system named ‘QandI’ was designed. This new music system is meant for social settings enriching the shared listening experience by providing social information. Every active user can be assigned to a color, giving them an identity within the system. In this way, while everyone requests their favorite songs via the digital interface, others can become aware when changes are made in the queue and by whom via the tangible interface. Each colored row on the tangible interface represents a song in the queue. After field deployments, we learned that providing authorship as social information has great potential in improving the shared music listening experience in social settings. Future opportunities are discussed in the report accessible below.
My contribution
In this project, aside from team effort I also had some specific contributions myself. With acritical attitude, I started managing the project regarding monitoring development and evaluating the process frequently together with the team.I did also actively evaluate all obtained learnings in the studies we performed, even though I did not execute these. I took responsibility for developing the digital interface in the functional prototype. This interface was needed for the field deployments so that we could validate our concept.
