Shape
Designing the future of music curation
Shape is a speculative product that 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.
Collaboration between RCA/ICL x Lawrence Azerrad of LAD Design x AEG - UK x BST Hyde Park 2020 (cancelled) x Various Music Industry Guests
The Future Happened: Designing the Future of Music – Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA)
SF Design Week 2020 – Designing the Future of Music
Collaboration between RCA/ICL x Lawrence Azerrad of LAD Design x AEG - UK x BST Hyde Park 2020 (cancelled) x Various Music Industry Guests
Speculative Design Module – Part 1 / 2
Royal College of Art / Imperial College London
February 2020
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.
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.
The big question:
What kind of music do you listen to?
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.