We Hope You’ll Dance
Wrapping up our MHCI Capstone project, and presenting a vision for the future of music listening
Welcome back, music enthusiasts, designers, readers! This publication follows the MHCI Amazon Music team as they hurl further towards finishing their capstone project exploring the future of music experiences in IRL scenarios. We’ll be cataloguing our sprint-by-sprint process, as well as any insights we gain along the way.
Our team has been hard at work finalizing our hi-fidelity prototypes, fleshing out our presentation narrative, and building a future world for our concept video (along with some other surprises). With our final presentation looming a week away, the team has solidified around a model for what a future evolved Amazon Alexa looks like, how it will integrate music into your everyday life, and several scenarios which demonstrate strong use cases for this. In this post we’ll give a brief overview of those use cases (without giving away too much from our final presentation!).
For more information about our project, MHCI, and our team, check out our first blog post. ✨
The Scenarios
Without giving away too much from our presentation, we’ll be showcasing nine (!!!) scenarios, each with some unique features that demonstrate how an evolved music-focused Alexa can be integrated into your daily life.
The first four of these are focused on individual listeners — giving people the perfect song at the perfect moment, integrating music more deeply into their lifestyle, connecting more closely with their favorite artists, and gaining a deeper insight into their music identity.
The next set of scenarios focus on how music can connect multiple people and enable group experiences. This might include finding shared music identities with others, co-curating and co-listening with a group of people, discovering music from strangers around you, finding music embedded into your everyday life, and visiting new and exotic places through music.
We’re avoiding revealing too much detail about the scenarios here, but they’ll be fully shown in our final presentation as well as our final website.
The Presentation
We’ve been chugging away on the presentation, and we have our faculty run-through coming up tomorrow. Our presentation structure quickly discusses our early approaches to algorithm ownership via algo cards, our reasons for pivoting away from that, and then focuses heavily on the scenarios shown above. In the presentation, we flesh out the hi-fi visuals as well as address the data flow and privacy for each scenario.
We plan to close the presentation with a roadmap showing high-level development phases over the next five years which can guide Amazon towards achieving this future. Furthermore, we’ll include a more detailed roadmap breaking down development of each scenario within these high-level phases in our final report.
Farewells
This article marks the end of our long journey, and we thank those of you who have stuck with us along the way.We wanted to reserve some space for the teammates to relay some personal messages about their experience.
Parker — It has been an absolute pleasure to work with the team and Amazon Music. I am so thankful for the opportunity to work with such talented people and look forward to the end of graduate school! If you have any doubts about CMU or MHCI — don’t! Its a great experience especially capstone.
Irene — It’s been a long yet weirdly short, packed, crazy journey and I’m so proud about the work we’ve all done. Thank you to the brilliant folks at Amazon Music it was such an amazing time working with you all. Big thanks as well to our awesome faculty and amazing family, friends, cohort peers who have supported us and special thanks to my roommates who let us subject them to countless user testings. See you all at our final presentation! ✌️
Rissa — I have studied 6 years at Carnegie Mellon University, and this Capstone project has been the most intensive, dynamic, and rewarding experience for me. It’s been a blessing to have been able to tackle the future of music alongside a team of determined, hard-working, and kind individuals. Congratulations to my team and to the cohort for completing the MHCI program!
Olivia — This journey, despite feeling a bit anticlimactic given everything going on in the world outside of capstone, has been a novel and refreshing experience for me. It is my first time working in a team-based, client-facing project that lasts for 8 months and it was a great pleasure to be working with a team of truly talented individuals.
Gautham— I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with this wonderful team. I’m also grateful to have had these folks alongside me as we managed the transition into “the new normal”. I’m proud of the work that we’ve done, and of the trust that this team has built in each other. I have high hopes for all of us as we go on to become designers, researchers, developers, and whatever else! A big congrats to the team and the MHCI cohort as a whole for finishing what is surely an unorthodox year.
We’d like to extend a special thank you to our MHCI admin, our capstone team faculty Raelin Musuraca and Jason Spector, and our clients at Amazon Music for supporting us along the way.
Thanks for reading! 💖🎵👏
