I. Introduction
On September 23, 2011, I conducted an online interview with Ryan Raffa 1, a designer, artist and musician currently living in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a BS in Business Management and Marketing from Cornell University (2000) and an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons The New School for Design (2011). He is interested in rhythm, sound and the intersection between design and technology. He has recently graduated and his thesis project consisted in a tabletop music sequencer operated through colored acrylic pieces displayed over the surface of the interface. Raffa’s project is relevant to my own research because it deals with similar aspects and concerns: collaboration, music synthesis, and synesthetic relations between sound and visuals. Furthermore, I’m interested on his vision and experience tackling the process of making a thesis project.
II. Anticipated questions – Intended areas of conversation
This is the list of intended areas of conversation prepared prior to the interview:
Thesis process
- Can you explain how your thesis idea evolved during the thesis year?
- How different it ended up being from your what you first imagined?
- What were the things that influenced in the evolution of the idea?
- How broad were your subjects of study/ what different were the users you used for testing? Did you see any difference in how they approached the interface?
User experience and prototyping
- How did the prototypes tests change your preconceived ideas?
- What (in general) were the most valuable aspects of performing the tests?
- How broad were your subjects of study/ what different were the users you used for testing? Did you see any difference in how they approached the interface?
Collaboration
- Was this an important subject for your project? Why?
- How does the individual experience differ from the collective ones?
- What were the main features of RhythmSynthesis in terms of providing a space for collaboration?
- Postmortem evaluation
- Now after some time, how do you evaluate your project? Any improvements you would perform?
- Why do you think your project is relevant?
- What is the most valuable thing you can take out of the thesis process?
- Any “golden phrase” to share with me that I’m starting this process?
III. Record
The thesis process
Ryan Raffa stated that at the beginning he had no clear idea of how the final form would look like. The project started taking shape after attending several conferences and meetings with relevant people. He recalls a meeting at Carnegie Hall about Music Education which changed the direction of his project. After this meeting, his interest in exploring how is sound made, and what are the ways to illustrate that back to people became more clear.
Using the library resources was also an important aspect in the evolution of the idea. He basically checked out anything related to sound: from engineering manuals to art, trying to get as much influence from different areas as possible.
At first he was very focused on the idea of how to use sound to learn about about our everyday’s life, and even though is not an explicit aspect of the final piece, he feels that that original idea is still embedded: “ I ended up building an instrument, an installation” so the original idea comes to light in a more exploratory manner.
User experience and prototyping
When prompted to talk about the things that were most influential in the evolution of the project, Raffa points out the importance of constant prototyping and iterative design. One of the milestones was the moment when he was able to escape from the idea that building a very sophisticated prototype is better than building one with lower resolution. Rapid prototyping allows you to test many aspects in a short period of time, so he created a lot of quick prototypes, sometimes building two or more per week, and some of them were made in less than fifteen minutes.
Consequently, he states the importance of putting those prototypes in front of people without telling them what to do, or without correcting their behaviors when performing a test. Taking this passive position leads to important unexpected discoveries.
In general he was very specific with the people he chose to test the interface, especially in the first stages of evolution of the project. Every time he made a prototype he also created a storyboard or a user scenario to better define the target user for that specific iteration. He had a specific list of people from different backgrounds to test the interface: a designer, a musician, an engineer, a scientist and an educator. Seeking needed a broad sample of people so he could get different feedbacks. “ Not everyone is going to see the project as you do ”, he states.
As important as having a broad range of feedback is the ability to filter all that information : “ …you finally decide what feedback to use and what to disregard ”.
Collaboration
According to Raffa, one of the most important parts of music is the community around it, and how they collaborate and share. Within his project, one of the main goals was to create an environment where non-musicians could feel comfortable and that was still challenging enough to attract more experienced musicians. He thinks that collaboration is becoming every time more important not only in the music realm, and in the future it will dominate the way to operate in every aspect of our lives. With that idea in mind, a musical instrument seemed to him a good way to investigate collaboration.
“ The whole idea of music is a pairing of different instruments or rhythms. Although you can have one person playing different set of beats, where the interesting things come out -like in jazz- is in the introduction of new ideas or new directions, that can only really happen with more than one person”.
Postmortem
Looking back to his project now with more time perspective, Raffa is able to make the distinction between projects and iterations. He states that a project is never done and what is finite are the iterations of that project.
As for the future of the project, he is planning to create a new iteration, because he feels that this current version is already finished. For the ACM conference, for instance, he is going to make something different, incorporating the feedback he has compiled so far.
As a final word to finish the interview, Raffa was asked to share any thoughts that could be helpful for someone that is starting its own thesis project. He instantly responded with the Ten Thousand Hour rule by Malcolm Gladwell : “If you do anything for ten thousand hours, you will become good at it”.
IV. Conclusions
Conducting this interview was a great learning experience because now I know much more about the experience of thesis process. Now I have a better overall understanding of what is difficult, what are the key points that need to be addressed in an investigation involving interfaces for sound generation.
Definitely one of the most important points that I can take away from Raffa’s experience is the relevance of having an iterative and constant user-testing process. The fact that it is more valuable to build rapid low-res prototypes to test several different aspects instead of trying to build less but more finished ones is something that I will try to incorporate into my own iterative process.
Bibliography
Buxton, William. Sketching user experiences: getting the design right and the right design, (Boston : Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, 2007), 337.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers : The story of success. (New York: New York : Little, Brown and Co.,2008).