Tangible User Interfaces - Fall 2011

Reimagining An Album

by Laura Devendorf and Chelsey Tanaka

Goals & Inspiration:
This project was born from a convergence of interests in creating a mixtape for the digital age and creating dynamic photo albums that link physical photos with audio narratives. The two starting points shared many commonalities, as they are both items intended to be shared among intimate groups. They offer a way of holding physical evidence an emotion or experience that transcends time.

By using the mix tape as a starting point, we imagine a system for friends to co-create playlists and share other forms of inspiration. Like mix tapes, our solution aims to facilitate the transfer of highly personalized, meaningful gifts between friends, but in our solution the lines between gift-giver and receiver will be nonexistent. Whereas a single mix tape was single-directional (given from one friend to another) and fixed (the songs were static), this system will be collaborative and dynamic. The system will also support most paper based media such as photos, post cards, small books and ticket stubs to name a few.
 

Usage scenario:
Alice and Amy are friends.  Amy lives in New York and Alice in San Francisco.  Alice compiles a few items that Amy would like: a playing card with a trumpet player, a handmade book she found at an art fair and a drawing she made of a sea gull to represent an inside joke between her and Alice.  Alice logs onto our web interface and maps each item to a song: the sea gull drawing to Flock of Sea Gulls, the playing card to Louis Armstrong’s Basin Street Blues and the book to a song by The Books.  She puts the items in our custom-made player box and ships it to Amy in New York.  Amy gets the package, sets the player on her desk and hits "play."  Each item plays in sequence, always displaying the object that's currently playing.  Amy loves the song by The Books, so she puts the object that maps to the Books song on the player and hits repeat to play it continuously.  While listening, Amy collects objects that remind her of Alice, maps them to songs and adds them to the player, which she'll ship back to Alice.  Together Alice and Amy have created a collaborative playlist that compiles their shared memories.  

Related Work:
Several other projects have attempted to capture some of the nostalgia and benefits of mix tapes and apply them to digital forms of music. Three individuals have posted instructions on instructables.com, explaining how to make a USB stick that attaches to a cassette tape, connecting digital music to the nostalgia of the cassette tape. Similarly, MAKE’s blog features a tiny mp3 player housed inside a cassette tape. The website for the band Sonic Youth features a web representation of a mix tape that is used as an interface to stream songs.

The implementation that most closely meets our design criteria is IDEO’s C60 Redux, highlighted on the Arduino blog: http://arduino.cc/blog/2010/12/17/ideos-c6o-redux-brings-mixtapes-back/. The C60 Redux represents songs as colored cards with RFID chips that can be read by dropping them on a table-like interface. The cards can be decorated in a personalized way, thus capturing the artistic flair of a mix tape cover. Despite these similarities, we see several key differences between IDEO’s implementation and our idea. First, IDEO’s tool seems designed to be used by multiple individuals in a social setting, whereas we envision a collaborative process of creating a playlist between individuals across time and space. Secondly, we want to create a simple process for friends to share music and think that requiring an RFID chip in every card would be a logistical barrier. Lastly, in IDEO’s implementation, it is difficult to determine which song is playing when multiple cards are on the player. We are interested in creating a strong connection between the song and the visual representation of that song.

Description:
To create a playlist, an individual creates or gathers a set of objects and links one per song. Our initial idea was to have all these objects follow the same form factor (e.g. a 3 x 5 in. index card), but depending on implementation we may be able to accommodate objects of different shapes and sizes. The individual making the playlist goes to a web interface, uploads a song, then tags the physical object with a bar code or other ID.

To listen to the playlist, objects are arranged in the reader in a certain order, but can be easily reconfigured depending on the listener’s preference. As each song is played, the physical object that represents that song occupies a position at the front of the reader so that it is clear which song is playing. The listener can then add his or her own songs and objects to the collection and send it back to the first individual or to another friend.