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Assignment 4 – Social Media. Music Application
Idea:
Music and music applications are parts of our everyday life. For most people this is just about consuming music using an musical player and earphones. For those who want to produce their own music powerful enough home computers, quite cheap audio I/O´s and softwares have allowed people to produce since at least 15 years now. But how about sharing the creative process of making a song with others? Very few software applications provide this kind of functions.
Think about charing and hearing other peoples work in real time, selecting just an elements of a song such as the drums and do something new to that! Looking arround we find all those social medias where we are sharing photos and text about our selves. But how about our own music compositions in terms of notes, MIDI, drums and audio snippets? There seem to be an enormous pull force in the marked of people wanting to share stuff and collaborate. We want to release this power in the field of music making and decided to look at a consumer level music mixer application from the point of view of social media.
Description:
Musical Mixer Software has a lot of features but basically it allows to choose instruments, to mix them, loop them, and to create some nice and new melody. Of course parts of melody can be cut, modified, rewritten from the scratch and saved.
Original Screenshot of MAGIX Music Maker
Above is a screen from a consumer software addressing the needs of musicians. Our idea is to provide more features for collaboration:
Music Mixer Enriched by Social Media Features
Lets look on the picture. Social media features are grouped on the left panel, which can. be shown and hidden. Panel has four main areas: “Share Your Work”, “Your Previous Works”, “Your Work Modified by” and “Public Works”.
– User can share his work in public or private (only friends will be able to view it.) They can change their author name to provide anonymity.
– User can rate the song and look through the number of downloads and have an estimate on its popularity.
– Author of melody can look through his list of previous works, and see who have edited and uploaded it back.
-Users can download publicly available content or private content which are shared by friends, so that they can work on. Instead of waiting for the muse faerie to come, they can base their song on somebody else’s work.
But the main benefit of this interface – user can make a music and share it in real time. Then other users can add their own instruments to the melody, here the instant difference and share it again. All parts are available for downloading and mixing as it can be seen on the third (bottom) area.
An implicit benefit of using this system is that, your work is shared and you can access it from any computer or ubiquitous device. Which also means it is backed up and data loss probability is lower.
A collaboration music tool can also help amateur musicians to get aid from more professional ones. They will receive feedback from more experienced musicians and might be able to collaborate with them. Professional musicians can also utilize it to get an understanding of possible reactions to their work.
Restrictions:
The restrictions for such kind of social media will be availability of server, which will save all the information, shared by people. But this is easy to achieve. That’s why we believe musical social media application is useful a lot and can be a valuable for majority of music’s fans.
Users should also be encouraged to share as much as they can, since it is only one application, the content of shared works could be narrow. Program should act convincingly to widen this content. A possible improvement can be integrating the software to other social mediums such as Facebook or Twitter. There can be automatic status updates sent to these platforms, which will advertise the program and author at the same time. These social platforms can be used as an announcement medium for people who do not use the program but want to follow certain musicians.
Assignment 3: Graphical representation – A calendar
Design rationale
“And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle
The Circle of Life”
The text above is a clip from Circle of life, the theme of the animated picture The Lion King (Disney, 1994). The world surrounding us is cyclic; the seasons, the months, the daylight and so is also the clocks all of wearing. Regardless religion or worldview we would like to suggest the Cirle of Life as the metaphor for a future way of overlooking the daily life, the upcoming month and and even the coming years.
Choosing the circle as a graphical carrier of our lives may appear somewhat fateful. When zooming out the personal calendar view to the extreme and watching the the years and maybe the life as a circle (or possibly as a spiral), we face the finite nature of ourselves.
According to the researchers Lundin and Söderholm (1994) both linear and cyclical time perspectives provide a rationale for arranging social relations. However, temporary organizations, like projects, are considered to use the time in a linear fashion, to lead the way from a starting point to termination. Life is not a temporary event perfectly comparable to a project.
Graphical representation
The proposed polar area chart design (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale) of the calendar consist of sectors and tracks like a computer hard disk drive. Days (24 hours) are illustrated by sectors of equal angles which in turn can be divided in sections, illustrating an activity or task. A long-lasting task will occupy a wider radial range. Activities can be disjoint, overlap or coincide. Figure 1 illustrates the concept of the polar area design and figure 2 a sketch of a design showing events of a week. The user can freely change view to day or year etc while still keeping the circular view. When viewing a whole year, detailes like days and meetings will of course be impossible to see, but segmentation like colour coding of different activities let the user see the proportions between e.g. meetings and privacy during the year just by a fast look. The angle between sector lines in the “life-view” perhaps need to be based on the average duration of life.
Polar area diagram (sector lines excluded) as a metaphor of a day, a month or the whole life.
Sketch of week view
Pros:
– An alternative look at time separated from the usual graphically and conceptually linear representation.
– Good cross diagram overview. Perhaps easier for the user see different phases and relationships between those by letting the user look both horizontally and vertically.
– Handles on the sector lines can provide a local zoom feature. When manipulated, the particular day is stretched or compressed to let the user see the innermost events clearer or just put focus on another part of the day.
– User feels usage of circle calendar is more comfortable from the different points of view;
– As circled form of calendar looks more natural, user can fill it in intuitivelly;
– Innovative design reflects the user’s ambition to live and plan, creatively and ‘out-of-box’.
Cons:
– A major disadvantage of the design is the asymmetrical appearance of the sectors beams, preventing the user to see actions early in the day (or month, year, life) as good as the later (wider) ones.
– A lot of people are suited a lot to traditional and linear design of calendar. It comes from the very early years of person’s life. All printed calendars are rectangular and linear organised.
Emotional consequences?
– Irritation with unfamiliar design, especially for first-time users, who are suited to rectangular, linear calendars;
– A fateful dimension
– Disgarmony feeling connected with asymmetrical appearance of sectors.
As a result of investigation the most obvious advantages and disadvantages of our solution, we found that advantages dominate. They show that polar area chart design is a good way to organise tasks in time and to visualize statistics. In turn, disadvantages highlight that nothing is absolutely perfect and more ideal design can be created. Possibly 🙂
Alternative out-of-box ideas
For example, what about triangular calendar as an alternative idea?
Triangular calendar scretch. Author - Eliazar Parra Cardenas.
References
Lundin, R. A., Söderholm, A. 1994. A theory of the temporary organization. Department of Business Administration, Umeå university, Sweden.
Assignment 2: Creativity
CREATIVITY
CALVIN RICHARD KLEIN was born on November 19, 1942, in the Bronx, New York, where he spent all of his childhood. The family lived relatively comfortably. His grandmother was a seamstress and he acquired his love of sewing from her. His mother encouraged his love of art and fashion. Klein attended the High School of Art and Design, which prepared students for careers in advertising and drafting. As a youth, while others his age were playing sports , Klein was busy studying, sketching fashion designs, and sewing. Later he moved on to the esteemed Fashion Institute of Technology, graduating in 1962. (Some other sources claim he never graduated) He spent five years as an apprentice in a coat and suit house on Seventh Avenue in New York City, working long nights and weekends to perfect his own designs. In 1968 Klein and close childhood friend Barry Schwartz created a Calvin Klein coat business.
STEVEN JOBS was born February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. In 1961 the family moved to Mountain View, California. At that time people started to refer to the area as “Silicon Valley.” He showed an early interest in electronics and gadgetry. He spent a lot of time working in the garage workshop of a neighbor who worked at Hewlett-Packard, an electronics manufacturer. Jobs also enrolled in the Hewlett-Packard Explorer Club. He saw his first computer at the age of twelve. He was very impressed, and knew right away that he wanted to work with computers. While in high school Jobs attended lectures at the Hewlett-Packard plant. On one occasion he boldly asked William Hewlett, the president, for some parts he needed to complete a class project. Hewlett was so impressed he gave Jobs the parts, and offered him a summer internship at Hewlett-Packard. After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Lacking direction, he dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography. He dropped out after one semester to visit India and study eastern religions. In 1975 Jobs joined a group known as the Homebrew Computer Club. One member, a technical whiz named Steve Wozniak (1950–), was trying to build a small computer. In 1976 he and Wozniak formed their own company. They called it Apple Computer Company, in memory of a happy summer Jobs had spent picking apples.
FEDERICO FELLINI was born in Rimini, Italy, on January 20, 1920, Fellini’s first passion was the theater, and at the age of 12 he briefly ran away from home to join the circus for around a year, his circus experiences are thought to be one of the basis for unique atmosphere in his movies. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, he wrote and acted with his friend Aldo Fabrizi, and during wartime he composed radio sketches for the program Cico e Pallina. Additionally, Fellini worked as an artist on fumetti (Italy’s illustrated magazines), and occasionally even made his living as a caricaturist at Roman restaurants. He continued his caricatures until late ages. In September 1939, he enrolled in law school at the University of Rome to please his parents although biographer Hollis Alpert reports that “there is no record of his ever having attended a class”. Entered college solely to avoid being drafted. He only entered film with the aid of Fabrizi, who recruited Fellini to continue supplying stories and ideas for his performances; between 1939 and 1944. The pivotal moment in Fellini’s early career came in the days following the Allied Forces’ 1945 liberation of Italy, when he and Fabrizi both began working with Roberto Rossellini, a young, largely unknown filmmaker with only a handful of directorial credits under his belt.
Sorry for cutting the exciting biographies of these geniuses’ short. Their stories continue with great successes and achievements everybody knows more or less. These three people demonstrated extraordinary creativity which helped them revolutionize their respective fields. It is helpful to observe the common points in their lives to understand how their creativity worked.
An easily observable commonality is that they lacked the proper education, which is the case with many other geniuses also, and they instead trained themselves. There is an ongoing debate on how school kills creative thinking and narrows the imagination of students. But there is no proved evidence on this claim, hence it is better to leave it like that and continue with other shared things. One of the most interesting things in the stories are, their careers start early. From the young ages with the support of their family, they make the first steps on what it is going to be their future jobs. They have gained experience which was much valuable in later stages of their life, and impacts of these experiences are clearly visible in their designs. Also starting at such young ages enabled them to perfect and sharpen their technique and knowledge in the field, earlier than their most colleagues, possibly giving them an ahead start on the race. Creativity lies on the basis of technique and knowledge; solely by itself, it may lead to interesting but unusable design. Providing less usability in product, hinders observability and appreciation of creativity in design.
After taking a look at how it happened for them in the long run, let’s take a look at geniuses’ work habits and how they created their working environment. The list contains work habits which are ought to be as peculiar as they can be, so some habits might be unhelpful to adopt. Fortunately, it is not a must to have such strange habits to be creative. But still creative people tend to have methods close in the level of peculiarity. Creative process leads to creative design in a sense.
Goethe kept a rotten apple in his desk to boost his creativity, Leo Da Vinci was sleeping 2 hours a day and was taking short naps during the day. Stephen King has a preparation before writing which he strictly applied. Winston Churchill would get up at 7:30 am but not leave bed until 11. Following links contain more :
http://www.slideshare.net/Naneero/9-geniuses-and-their-weird-habits-eng
http://blogs.forbes.com/kenmakovsky/2011/01/06/strange-work-habits/
http://kusterslaststand.blogspot.com/2010/04/famous-people-have-strange-work-habits.html
The habits of creative people leads to think that there are no guidelines to think creative. As different is each person from another one, as different they should have work habits. However it might be possible to offer some very general ideas about the process of thinking creatively.
Note every single idea during the day : Don’t think the idea is too trivial to note or useless. Traditional way to do is that carrying a pen and a notepad. But with technology it is easy to take notes on ubiquitous devices or computers and keep it synchronized. Google docs, Facebook Notes or Evernote might do it.
Pause brainstorming when feeling stuck and restart later : Sometimes people get lost in the problem, because they concentrated too much on it for a significant period of time. It might even be possible to gain time by the magically refreshing short breaks.
Inspiration comes while thinking the subject in background : May look contradicting with the above statement but didn’t Archimedes formed the fundamental theory of hydrostatics while taking bath. The muse can arrive while washing the dishes, having a small walk in the park.
Know that it takes time : It can require days, or months to reach an achievement. Sometimes there seems to be no progress in the work but it can happen all in one second. Being impatient is the most common problem in creative thinking.
Hope the article provided a general idea of thinking creatively, and how it happened for famous people.
Biographies are partially collected from the following sources, and are integrated.
http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ki-Lo/Klein-Calvin.html
http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ho-Jo/Jobs-Steve.html
http://www.biography.com/articles/Steven-Jobs-9354805
Assignment 1: Observe and analyse
The Case
When trying to use this common model of tin-opener it appears that it´s not completely trivial to understand how to fit in the tool to the tin. If you are left handed you have perhaps even more struggle with it. How about mental models of using a tool like this? This is the reason why we wanted to take a closer look at the design.
Exploring The Artifact
Originally invented by the company AB NilsJohan, the mechanical tin-opener is a practical household item probably used by thousands or millions today. The construction is built up arround a pincer mechanism carrying two wheels. One wheel is for cutting the tin and the other for supporting the tin while cutting. The wheels are mechanically coupled together by cog wheels. The flange of the tin is to be fit between the wheels. By turning the pinion a bit, the cutting wheel is brought down towards the support wheel fixing the flange of the tin in a correct position for operation. While the user keeps turning the pinion the wheels now rotate the cap. When turning the pinion backwards the mechanism releases the cap by letting the cut wheel raise back to the original position.
Found Issues
Pretty obvious, there are some major aspects to understand in order to use the mechanic tin-opener. Here is a video showing first a right handed and then a left handed test-person using the tool without thinking to much in advance. (Don´t laugh):
1. Even when looking close to the mechanism it´s not trivial to understand how to fit the tin, especially if the user has low vision. After some trial and error it eventually works.
2. Who is discriminated, the left handed or the right handed? Maybe there is an extra struggle to left handed people. Why? It seems like users tend to at first grab the pincer handles by their “primary hand” and the pinion wheel by the “secondary hand”. In this situation, the left handed person can´t fit the tool to the tin because the cutting wheel is downwards. By grabbing the tool by the (wrong) right hand, the left handed reach the pinion by crossing the arms. That´s not very good! But why is this a problem at all? Go back to stepp one, but now move the tin a bit to the left on the table, grab the pincer by the “primary hand” and the pinion by the secondary hand. Why didn´t we think about that from the beginning?
There seem to be a discrepance betwen the mental model of how to arrange the object in in front of the body and between the hands, and the actual way of using the tool.
3. The use of a tin-opener should not require great physical abilities. However, the mechanism of the current model is a bit tough for people with weak arms.
Suggested Development
1. We would add a guidinging device, steering the tin into the right initial position.
2. Let´s focus on a solution which can be spontanously used by both left and right handed people, corresponding the the mental model (or will) to have the object centered in front of you. One way of implementing that is to tilt the wheel mechanism unit relative the pincer handles by 90 degrees. By doing this the tin hang underneath and centered relative the mechanism and the user, regardless the user is left or right handed.
3. On top of the mechanism we place the turning pinion having a long swinging arm.
4. Arrows should be added to the tin-opener’s moving mechanism, showing clearly that the user needs to rotate the handle and to move the pincer.
The picture below shows some of the suggested design elements:
Do you find other solutions of the tin-opener problem! Please, let us know!
aliveedesign 
