Bridging Digital and IRL Music Experiences with Amazon Music & MHCI
An introduction to our project, our team, and a brief progress update
The way we experience music has plateaued over the past several years. Music streaming services are ubiquitous, and few things have changed about them in the recent past. How might we formulate what the future of music-listening looks like in the next 3–5 years and beyond?
Moreover, how might we utilize new devices and emerging technologies to create products and services which eliminate the barrier between private digital music experiences and “in real life” (IRL) music experiences? Advances in technologies such as wearables, AR/VR, sensors, and more enable novel interactions which will disrupt the music space in the years to come.
In partnership with Amazon Music, our 5-person MHCI Capstone team is embarking on an 8-month journey to address the questions and challenges posed above.
✨ Follow this publication for updates on our progress and milestones! ✨
What is MHCI Capstone?
The Master of Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI) program at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a rigorous one-year program which trains students for careers as UI/UX designers, user researchers, product designers, software engineers, and more.
The MHCI Capstone is the culmination of this program. Capstone is a two-semester, eight-month project which partners student teams with industry clients to solve “wicked” design problems. The first four months have students going out into the field and diving deep into user research, while the latter half involves synthesizing those findings into prototypes that innovate upon problem spaces that span a variety of industries (think NASA, Bloomberg, Harman, and more).
By the end of the MHCI Capstone, student teams and industry clients will have worked together end-to-end through the design process of a product development lifecycle.
Progress Updates // Jan 13 — Jan 24
Team charter
We wrote a team charter to define our goals, identify potential risks, and figure out skill-gaps in our team. We also identified our team’s core values and group norms. Defining these early on helped us establish a healthy and productive team culture.
Some of the team’s core values include:
- Life outside of school matters
- Mental health matters
- Respect other’s thoughts and opinions
- Think big! Innovate! Moonshot!
Playlist
We compiled a playlist of some of our team’s current jams, and shared this with our partners at Amazon Music. This was a good way for our team to get to know each other’s music tastes, have some nice background music for our team work sessions, and let our Amazon peers know a little about us as well!
Kick-off planning
With our kick-off planned for January 31st, we had two weeks to prepare for this 3-hour meeting. During this time, we’ve curated a packed kick-off agenda consisting of introductions, free-form conversation, ideation activities, and project scoping/logistics discussions. Our goals in this kick-off meeting are to gain a shared understanding of our problem space, demonstrate our capabilities as project leaders, build a working rapport with our client team, identify success criteria for this project, and come away with clear next steps.
Due to the forward-looking nature of our project, we’ve decided to run several rounds of the Situation Lab’s “The Thing From The Future” card game. This activity places us in a theoretical future determined by the prompts on the cards, and asks us to brainstorm a “thing” that exists in this future. We’ve created a customized version of the card set with some Amazon-Music-related prompts. We hope this will spur a conversation about our shared understandings of what the future looks like, and how this project might fit into that future.
One of our biggest challenges for this kick-off is that the meeting will be run entirely virtually, since our Amazon Music partners will not be on-site in Pittsburgh until later in February. Therefore, we must find ways to encourage active participation and engagement in a 3-hour meeting while not being able to collaborate physically. We’ve practiced several technology setups and content dry-runs to ensure that the virtual meeting will function as expected. We’ll be mailing them a set of cards to use for the activity so that they can participate along with us, and we’ll be encouraging them to get up and write on sticky notes and whiteboards when needed.
Faculty mentors
Our problem space is currently large and ambiguous: the music industry. To help us visualize what this space might look like in the next few years, we’ve been meeting with experts in the field to pick their brains. We’d like to extend a big thank-you to Stuart Candy, Mayank Goel, Jill Lehman, and John Zimmerman for speaking with us! We’d also like to thank Raelin Musuraca and Jason Spector for supporting us as our faculty mentors for this project.
Care package
Since our kick-off is being conducted virtually, our partners won’t receive any catering nor will they be able to participate in in-person activities with us. Rather than waiting for February to come around, we decided to send a bit of Pittsburgh to them.
In the care package:
- Pittsburgh-related goodies 🌉
- Popcorn 🍿(cheddar/caramel mix, obviously) — not pictured
- Custom postcards with a message from our team 💌
- A polaroid of our team 📸
- Our customized “The Thing From The Future” card set 🤖
Meet the Amazon Music MHCI Capstone team
Rissa Lee
Rissa is an interaction designer with a background in cognitive science and linguistics. Her love of language drives her to research and explore how people connect with one another and communicate across different mediums. You can catch her in her free time reading Italo Calvino and listening to techno/house.
Olivia Li
Olivia is a designer passionate about creative problem-solving and communication through visual expression. With her background as an oil painter, she is interested in using simple but elegant graphic forms as a means to optimize user experience. She does not have a favorite song. Or music genre. Or artist.
Irene Lin
Irene is a multi-disciplinary designer who focuses on delightful service experiences. She loves getting weird brainstorming about future tech! When she was 16 she saw the Arctic Monkeys in concert and fell madly in love with Alex Turner’s electric blue suede jacket and has been on the hunt for one ever since.
Parker Nussbaum
Parker is a user experience designer who is passionate about design and strategy. His previous experience as an industrial designer shapes how he views the relationships between physical and digital design solutions. He is a fan of all types of music from punk rock, to calypso, to deep disco tracks.
Gautham Sajith
Gautham has a background in full-stack software engineering, with a passion for visual & UX design. He’s also passionate about design systems, generative art, and ethical technology. He generally enjoys hip hop and indie R&B, but 98% of his music listening is “lofi hip hop radio — beats to study/relax to”.
