The focus on this project is on people finding new digital music at the physical location of the library and how the ‘to be designed product and/or service’ can stimulate social interaction and community building.

I conducted research on learning theories, the future of libraries, music as water (a paradigm for digital music), ubiquitous computing and finding new music. The result are grouped into a affinity diagram and distilled into a future vision:

• ‘My vision is a library where digital music is manipulated by physical and spatial interaction. These interactions afford social interaction in shared activities, community building and serendipity.’

With an iterative design process I was able to go into depth after only a few iterations. The preliminary design wasn’t really future proof though.

Preliminary Design

First design iteration (interaction styles)

The final design is a role playing system. One user’s incentive is to make the library space feel more like home by playing their own music. The only condition for the broadcaster is that he let’s the system stream music on a virtual layer into the surroundings. The second role is the listener. The listener is looking for new music and he can use the streamed content and the spatiality of the library to find new music.

Final Design (overview of the new library)

The prototype that was built to the design specifications was evaluated in a qualitative user test. The focus of the test was the difference of browsing nowadays and with my system. The results were very positive, although some critical remarks were made for improvements.

Prototype (mobile app)

This post is tagged Communities, Future Vision, Learning Theories, Library, music, Physical, project, Social Interaction, Virtual