03.20 + 03.22: Concept Speed Dating

1000 Ways Not to Design a Music Service

After coming back from spring break, we revisited our progress with clearer (and more rested) minds. In spite of the number of discussions we’d had to date, we found ourselves somewhat uninspired by our direction. We had reservations about pursuing the B2B service in terms of its originality, despite obvious plausibility.

Discovering 1000 Ways Not to Design a Music Service
To shake us out of our inspiration rut, we stepped back and considered services that could involve and utilize music to achieve other goals, rather than focusing so keenly on music as the product. This exercise helped us to generate more ideas, so we started to consider how we could use music as a tool. We hope that our project can achieve more than just a listening experience for the sake of listening, and this mindset seems promising.

One of the most interesting concepts to arrive from this exercise was around music and sleep.

We asked:

What if we combined sleep and music?
Could we design an ecosystem to track your sleep and adapt to play ambient music?
Could we leverage AI to generate the perfect sleep playlist?
Can we tap into the tele-health wave?

So we started to explore how we could elevate this idea from sleep application to sleep-music service. We considered things like sleep centers, medical research, health care, and hospitality as potentially related entities.

We see some strong opportunities in this direction as sleep is so vital to a person’s health and overall well-being, and music is found to have a positive effect on a person’s ability to sleep well.

Scenarios
For Thursday’s class, we were tasked with creating 5 scenarios of our service ideas. Still feeling somewhat conflicted about our 2 potential directions and not quite ready to move away from the initial concept, we created scenarios for each of the ideas. We also established some ideas about how the data could be applicable (as you can see in our post-it scenarios below).

Notes about how data could be applicable to our scenarios

This scenarios focuses on the upvote/downvote of the B2B service

This scenario shows how the business could install the music service within their environment

For the sleep scenario, we considered pairing it with the hospitality industry

This scenario is a walkthrough of how people would use the “Tel-a-health” side of the sleep application

After presenting our scenarios to our “speed-dating” group on Thursday, we realized that the ideas had very different merits. The B2B service is highly practical and would provide us a clear path for the rest of the semester, but the sleep concept, while less defined, seems to allow for greater creativity and originality. We surveyed some of the other graduate design students in our class, and each of them echoed this same sentiment. Our notes on the feedback are below:

Responses about our B2B Service

Responses about our Sleep Service