The Future Happened is an exhibition that examines how design and art deepens our relationship with music.

[ view the exhibition ]

The Future Happened is an exhibition that examines how design and art deepens our relationship with music. Exploring how design can be key in sharing our stories and amplifying our power to make a difference in the world. Examining innovation and technology that enhances connections and opens doors, reinforcing our capacity to spark change.

This exhibit was built over the course of the COVID19 Pandemic starting April of 2020, collaborating remotely from across the world to make it happen. Such an amazing team and a such a wild year.

Curation Team

Lawrence Azerrad – Lead Curator
Ruby Savage – Curator
Floyd Hall – Curator
Marlon Fuentes – Curator

Production Team

Sarah Panzer – Producer, Associate Curator
Christian Pugsley – Lead Web Designer, Producer, Developer
Harika Adivikolan – Education Initiative Author, Producer, Web Designer
Omar El-Sabrout – Exhibit Text Author / Editor
Seetharaman Subramanian – Web Production
Daniel Karaj – Web Production, Lead Interview Editor
Oriana Ren – Graphic Design

MODA

Laura Flusche, Ph.D. – Executive Director
Veronica Klucik – Exhibitions Manager
Ross Landenberger – Marketing Manager

Support

Aileen Farshi – Social Media
Austin Aubry – Interview Editing
Ayana Enomoto-Hurst – Interview Editing
Blue Hominy : Hadley Bazemore – Public Relations / Publicity
David Pugsley – Technical Drawings
David Onwukeme – Interview Editing
Kevin Lee – Interview Editing
Marco Da Re – Interview Editing
Thomas Pugsley – Interview Editing, Music Production

Posters printed for the exhibition

Designing the Future of Music:
the initiative.

“Designing The Future of Music is an LADdesign authored and led multi platform initiative that challenges graduate design students, designers, makers and the public to reimagine how we connect to music in a digital age. It’s a program that stands at the intersection of futures literacy, cultural and social impact and the universal power of music.

“Taking the form of academic workshops (at the Design Futures Lab at California College of the Arts, as well as the Global Innovation Design (GID) program at Dyson School of Design Engineering, Royal College of Art, Imperial College London) a museum exhibit (Museum of Design Atlanta) public events and books, the program draws on the contemporary practice of speculative design, demonstrating how initiative outcomes can be used to amplify the social power of music and the music experience, redress imbalances in the industry between makers, providers, and listeners, and the provocation of more meaningful and authentic creative experiences for the public, the artist and designer.”

– LAD Design

I was lucky enough to take part in the Future of Music initiative during my time at the Royal College of Art / Imperial College London while pursuing my Master’s in Global Innovation Design. In the lead up to organizing for the museum exhibition, I was able to participate in 2 of the design modules that focused entirely on the conceptual future of music. How it would look, what we could do as listeners, and how that could affect the music industry as a whole. For more details on those projects and their place in the museum exhibition itself, see the links below..

Shape
Synk
GID x CCA: Designing the Future of Music

Museum of Design Atlanta
(MODA)

I was asked by Lawrence in early 2020, as the COVID19 Pandemic was ramping up, if I wanted to be a part of the team that would design and build the first ever entirely digital exhibition to be put on by the Museum of Design Atlanta. We worked remotely over the course of the year to plan, design, execute, and launch the exhibition in April of 2021. Working with over 40 different independent exhibitioners from around the world, the Future Happened: Designing the Future of Music was a celebration of all things music and technology, with interactive experiences, interviews with the artists and designers, and a live concert series held entirely online over the course of the first few months the exhibit was open.

Promotional list of featured artists and exhibitioners

Design

Our goal throughout the course of the design process was to find a way to encourage visitors to explore. Unlike in a physical exhibition where visitors are free to walk and wander around the space, websites can be fairly limiting with only one screen to see at a time. And when our overarching goal was equally showcase all of our exhibitioners, this challenge became our main focus to solve for.

Our solution was a combination of guided experiences through the content, following one of a select number of themes: Healing, Power, Community, Tech, Timeless, and Atlanta. Each theme contained a collection of artists and exhibitioners from the entire group, but many exhibitioners overlapped categories and themes which helped take visitors across from one side to the other.

Additionally, I designed the homepage to be a collection of tiles filled with images or text, one for each exhibitioner in the exhibit. But with the help of a little bit of code, each time a visitor lands on the homepage of the site, the order of the tiles is randomly assigned, giving you a different view everytime you hit the page.

Process snapshots

The Dungeon

Aside from the website itself, one element I’m excited to have left my mark on was the design of the Dungeon Family’s page within the exhibition, an experience built to help tell the story of the family behind some of the biggest names in rap history. Check it out for yourself here.

“Imagine a dank crawl space in an unfinished basement.

Any one will do.

Should be dusty, pretty dark, and definitely cramped, even just for a couple of people, no? Now picture that imagined space as the launching point for one of the most celebrated collectives in American music in the last 30 years—The Dungeon Family.

After being forced out of an apartment in Southwest Atlanta because of noise complaints, Rico Wade, his mother, and two sisters moved to a small house in the Lakewood Heights neighborhood of Atlanta, where Rico set up the basement as a makeshift recording studio. That space—The Dungeon—provided a home base for Wade, Ray Murray, and Pat “Sleepy” Brown to coalesce as Organized Noize, and served as the foundation for musical family ties that grew to include Parental Advisory, OutKast, Cool Breeze, Goodie Mob, Joi, Backbone, Witchdoctor, and Big Rube; and ultimately extended to the likes of Killer Mike and Future.”

– Omar El- Sabrout, Dungeon Family, The Future Happened

This page was designed in collaboration with sound design studio One Thousand Birds, and my two younger brothers David and Thomas – David creating the architectural drawings for the Dungeon Family Home, and Thomas producing music to be used by OTB.

Conclusion

The Future Happened was a wonderful success with tens of thousands of site visitors, despite the challenges the world was facing during the pandemic, and MODA is planning to open a physical extension of this exhibit in Atlanta in the coming years.

...

Collaboration between RCA/Imperial x Lawrence Azerrad of LAD Design x
AEG - UK x BST Hyde Park 2020 (cancelled) x Various Music Industry Guests

Team:
Maraid McEwan - LinkedIn
Seetharaman Subramanian - Website | LinkedIn
Nikolas Grafakos - LinkedIn

Shape enables people to create an expression of their musical persona; combining both your music listening history and your physiological reactions to curate how you listen in the future.

Only a three week design sprint, our cohort of students at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College worked in small teams to look into the future of music—music listening, musical performances, music experiences, and music technology. Organized by Lawrence Azerrad and partnering with AEG - UK / BST Hyde Park, our goal was to research, ideate, test our new technologies, and present a new vision of the future of music.

Pitch video for Shape

Design brief.

Design and develop an experiential solution for the future of music. Your proposition should be part of a broader service, product or experience - but you will focus primarily on the design and build of the human-music interaction at the centre of your proposition.

This project happened pre-COVID19, but still took a look into the future, as an opportunity to reimagine the possibilities of social experiences, live performance, and sensory expression.

Highlights of the collaboration and end products from the charette.
Video by Lawrence Azerrad and AEG

The big question.

What kind of
music do you
listen to?

As we took a dive into our explorations, we found ourselves coming back to one simple question that’s been plaguing people for years: what kind of music do you listen to? Broken down, your music taste is defined by two things: what you already know and listen to, and how you feel in the moment while you’re listening to music. This prompted our main driving question:

How might we enable people to connect through expression of their musical persona and instinct? By helping them to create a musical identity through instinct & history.

Measuring instinctual reactions.

Cognitive stimulus: Measuring a user’s immediate reaction to physical stimulus, translating data to measurable metrics which can then be manifested. Ex. heart rate, brain activity, skin temperature, blood pressure, goosebumps, micro-expressions, memories and associations.

Boiled down, we found quickly that a reliable and testable way of measuring someone’s reaction to music is through heart rate and galvanic skin response (measured through your finger tips).

Building our own set of sensors, using simple arduino pieces, we were able to pull reliable readings (as reliable as we could as design students, and from only a few day’s work) from classmates that we used in our experiment that you’ll see below. We combined these readings with part 2 of our research: measuring your music listening history.

Prototyping and user testing process

Understanding music listening history:

Historical Interactions: Referencing the user’s musical history through existing platforms to look at multiple layers of metrics and data. Ex. history, genre, artist, listening time, skip rate, bpm, frequencies, variety.

Our goal was to access Spotify’s API, to see if we could identify patterns between songs people listen to and the underlying traits of the songs—essentially attempting to understand how Spotify’s algorithm works. It’s stupidly fascinating but, without getting too deep, Spotify categorizes songs based off certain metrics (mentioned in the previous paragraph and all publicly available) and serves you new songs every week that match those metrics.

A simplified diagram showing our plan to replicate the Spotify algorithm in real-time with users.

We wanted to know if we could manipulate that process, but instead of using previous songs you’ve listened to, we wanted to use emotion and instinctual response to be that catalyst—resulting in the framework pictured above.

Our goal was to play the user a specific song (based off of the songs they listen to or enjoy), and then—based off their physical response to the first song—play them another song that would increase their mood or decrease their mood. Then replicate it a second time immediately afterwards.

Crazy thing is, we did.

Faking the algorithm.

Once Seetha and I got access to the Spotify API, we set to work with our experiment: utilizing our classmates, playing a song they like, taking a reading, then essentially faking the Spotify algorithm and playing new songs they would like—songs with similar back-end readings—and seeing if the readings matched, and most often they did.

Behind the scenes of our experimentation, attempting to fake the Spotify algorithm based off our users physical responses to songs, utilizing back-end access to the Spotify API and custom arduino sensors.

A quick time-lapse video showing our process of setting up the experiment and testing our fellow classmates.

Finding results.

Measuring each person’s GSM (galvanic skin measurement) response—accessed through a custom python script developed by Seetha, we were able to see results between their initial song choice and the two additional songs that we selected based off their initial reading.

We were able to both positively and negatively influence their arousal and measure their response, which was really amazing.*

*Obviously, these were not 100% reliable and we are not trained scientists. But we were able to see enough of a correlation to bee optimistic about our proposal. There are already many wearables, like the Apple Watch or Fit-bit for example, that take daily, reliable readings of these same measurements that could provide much more accurate results.

An example of results from one of our users in the testing process, the X axis is measuring time in seconds, and the Y axis is measuring GSM Response.

Final concept.

Shape is the manifestation of our concept, joining your music listening history with your instinctual reactions, real-time. We believe that combining these two areas of expression will create a more intimate and accurate representation of your identity, which can be visualized, utilized as a tool, and communicated to others.

In this future space, we imagine a world where wearables are monitoring our daily life, and can be easily integrated into the Shape platform—essentially introducing a new metric to drive your daily listening.

Final concept poster
View high resolution version pdf [ here. ]

User agency & control.

Obviously, this could seem a bit overbearing, and a bit “Big Brother” in nature, which is why we were sensitive to the levels of agency and control that you need to have when using Shape. As you likely saw in the video, there are three levels of interaction built into Shape: automated, suggested, and self-controlled.

Automated:

If you give Shape full control, it will run seamlessly in the background with your music listening platform of choice, monitoring your real-time reactions and adjusting your music accordingly.

Suggested:

If you would like a bit more control, allow shape to monitor how you’re feeling and it will provide suggestions for music that fits your response. If you’re feeling down, Shape can provide suggestions to lift you up, or provide suggestions to let you stay in whatever funk you’re in, helping you process whatever it is you’re going through.

Self-controlled:

Finally, when it comes down to it, your music is exactly that—your music. Turn off shape and listen to the things that you want to listen to, no questions asked.

Visualizing & sharing.

Lastly, to tie everything together, Shape is not only a system to help you more intimately connect with your music, but also to help you connect with other listeners, compare individual shapes, and help you discover new music.

We’ve broken down the visualization to a few key parts, all based off of your interactions with your music listening platform of choice.

An example of a user’s personalized shape

Color:

Color simply represents individual music genres.

Form:

The changing form represents the amount of time you spend listening to a genre. The bigger it gets the more time you’ve spent listening to it.

Texture:

Indicated the variety of artists in a genre. A more densely packed texture represents a wider variety in the number of artists you have listened to in that specific genre.

Orientation:

The placement of the forms on the map—as inspired by Silvan Tomkins’ work on emotional categorization—indicate the emotion that you have associated with each genre. With the understanding that it will grow and change as time passes.

Defining your shape.

Above are the building blocks that define how your shape takes form, each being informed by the inflow of data to your personal device / monitoring device, and then brought to life. Our hope is that Shape will become a new abstract representation of your musical identity, one that changes with you, as your music taste evolves. That makes it unique and entirely yours, and we see Shape becoming more than just a pretty picture—a tool for curation, an excuse for immersion, and an aid for expression.

three core
principles of shape:

1. Curation.

Shape could seamlessly integrate and work with the current music listening platforms and a connected smart device, allowing for a richer and more engaging music listening experience. You could utilize shape as a tool to dive in—explore the things you listen to, and find new music you may have never seen before.

2. Immersion.

In working with AEG and the BST Music Festival, we imagined Shape being used to create immersive experiences that engage with diverse audiences. That could be through a personalized experience, one on one, with your music through an interactive booth—giving the festival goer a gift to take with and share. Or it could be a fully immersive experience, utilizing the bio-feedback, from all the users who take part, to create a changing and evolving visualization of the current mood of the festival.

3. Expression.

Lastly, Shape will enable you to communicate and express your musical identity to your friends and family. Sharing and accessing your friends individual shape will allow you to see what they listen to, how they’re listening, and how it makes them feel—but only as much as they want you to know.

Narrative & video.

Our final deliverable for this project was a 1 minute pitch video, followed by a 5 minute pitch presentation, so we wanted to hit the main points as simply and straightforward as possible.

We worked as a team to refine our message, then broke up into teams to get the things we needed. Seetha and Maraid refined the script, wrote the narrative, recorded the voice-over, and finished the presentations. Nik created on all the animations, learning AfterEffects from scratch, and helped with my work filming interviews, editing footage, and producing the final video you can watch at the top of the page.

Conclusion.

Defining for the future of music was an absolutely fascinating experience. Looking at the nature of the music industry, and then attempting to create and test a new application of technology to the space was a challenge, definitely. But I feel like we found something that could be developed in the future, but also something to be implemented today. Excited to see where this could lead.

And lastly a BIG THANK YOU to my amazing team, we put out a crazy amount of work for only three weeks of work.

From left to right: Maraid, Me, Nikolas, and Seetha.