I read some texts from Tina Blaine at the beginning of this process, most of them analyze different projects from various authors, but she also has designed a prolific amount of musical interfaces. One of the most relevant for my investigation is the Jam-O-Drum, an interactive tabletop interface that can be considered as a predecessor of the Reactable. Blaine along with her collaborator Tim Perkins wrote a paper for DIS 2000 [1], where they explain in detail the process of designing the system: they divided the study into two initial phases. On the first, they performed tests to define the interactional and graphical aspects separately. In Phase Two, the results from Phase one were incorporated into an integrated model, testing again the results.
My plan is to incorporate a similar iterative methodology, testing specific aspects of interaction through prototypes, and by the end of the semester integrate all the individual findings into a final, integrated proposal.
Prototyping will be an important aspect for my research: through user’s reactions to these prototypes, I will able to see what are the most suitable solutions. Prototypes will become then the spinal cord, the main road that will lead to answers and discoveries, and eliminate or confirm assumptions.
I’m framing my research into three main areas: The experience, the interface and the context. My intuition says that defining the experience first will lead naturally into taking decisions about the users, interface and space that supports the experience.
So inspired by Blaine’s model, the sequence should be divided into three steps:
- Define what kind of experience
- Define users
- Design an interface to facilitate the defined experience for the defined users.
Along the multiple examples I’ve studied doing research, I’ve seen a trending challenge when designing interactive sound systems for novices: balancing the level between expressivity and complexity. It is of the most importance, as this balance determines the entry-level. Let’s take an example from traditional instruments: a xylophone requires a simpler gesture than a violin, but so are the expressive possibilities of creating different timbres. Conversely, mastering a violin is harder than mastering a xylophone, but the expressive range of the instrument is wider. This is a trade-off I need to be address carefully, because my goal is to provide a very low entry-level, but to make the interface as expressive as possible.
Probably the entry level is one of the most important things I will have to put attention to. A different issue that also deals with this idea is to decide if this will be exclusively designed for novices. What I think it would be the perfect situation is a space where novices and experts can share the same experience, having similar amounts of joy. Maintaining the state of flow for both levels of expertise is a difficult task, and I feel that the answer is focusing more on the experience rather than in the musical aspects.
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[1] Blaine, Tina, and Tim Perkis. 2000. The Jam-O-Drum interactive music system: a study in interaction design. In Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, 165–173. DIS ’00. New York, NY, USA: ACM.