What gets us grooving?
Week 2 | 03.04.2018–03.09.2018 | Project Direction
Post written for the Designing for Service class| Spring 2018 | Carnegie Mellon School of Design | Instructor: Molly Wright Steenson & Daphne Peters| Team: Steven Ji, Devika Khowala, Emma Zelenko, and John Walker Moosebrugger
Last week, our team came to a consensus that we’d like to create a service for local artists and musicians. We did an initial mapping to create a landscape of possible stakeholders and what their expectations and needs might be. We also mapped the existing services that our stakeholders currently engage with.
The focus this week was to talk to local musicians, music students, hobbyists and learn from them about how they pursued their passion for music and what were some of the difficulties that they faced or services/products they wish existed. The objective of this quick research was to test our speculations, identify pain points and map opportunities for a viable service.
There are three main findings from our interviews:
Let’s make music together: Musicians are always on the lookout for people they can jam with or practice with. Especially, the ones living in suburbs have a difficult time finding other musicians with similar interests. They usually have to travel to city centers to engage with the music scene and other artists. Musicians often use Craigslist to find other people they can jam with.
No place for love: The availability of a space to practice or hold Jam sessions is a huge problem as most houses aren’t sound-proof and musicians fear being a nuisance for their neighbors. A music enthusiast, we spoke to, took his violin lessons in isolated service stairhalls with his sheet music stuck on walls.
For the rush of music: Most of the people who were pursuing music as a hobby would love a chance to perform for an audience. Interestingly, they preferred not to perform for money and instead enjoyed the rush that doing a live performance gave them. They felt that performing in public helped them practice more regularly, develop a network with other musicians and the feedback from the performances helped them hone their craft. An interviewee said that if he would enjoy the music at a local bar, he would approach them to find a spot for his band to perform. He said that music is a lot about spontaneity, about meeting new people and building relationships.
Next Steps
Based on our findings, we would be developing initial concepts that would address all or some of the findings from our research.
