Thanks to brainswarm technique I have been able to generate some possible outputs that are answering the question: how to connect physical and digital world through audio streaming platforms?

I’ve been exploring how does a user interact with an audio streaming platform and my conclusions were that it is pretty much frictionless as touching or clicking a play button. My intention in this experiment was to prototype or design an interface or an intermediary step for users when they feel like listening to music in answer to society’s demands of consuming interfaces where there is little effort needed and business that are putting that in practice in order to collect behavioral data of users.

Every living thing on this planet needs energy to survive and we also produce it. Every moving body has kinetic energy, which changes depending on the speed. I’ve come up with an output where users have to produce kinetic energy in order to transform it into power and create sustainable energy equivalent to the consumption of the track that the user would like to play. This is how eventually a streaming platform could connect the physical space and the digital interface and create a sustainable loop.

1st output of the experiment

The interface that I came up with is a chair that a user is sitting on while listening to music. This chair can move in 360 direction and when the user selects the track he has to generate enough power through moving the chair in various directions to start the song which is than played for 30 seconds. If he wants to listen it longer he has to continue to generate power. This could be an example of a sustainable label that streams music and users that want to consume it have to “put fuel” in the infrastructure.

2nd output of the experiment

The second idea has bloomed out of the brainswarm’s output and while working on the Cornel Box. I imagined a “box” that would enable supporters of the musical label or the audio streaming platform to deepen their immersive experience. Users could put their hand in the box and they could feel changes in air that are often used in music to describe sounds. Air temperature would change as well as humidity depending whether the track is “warm”, “cold”, “wet” or “dry”.

Next steps

  • research technical part of generating power (what kind of tools are needed…)
  • another brainswarm sketch
  • get some feedback from cohort