Our chosen technology history topic was the evolution of music players and technology, specifically in sharing how these facets have changed over the years. We wanted to develop an exhibit that allowed for older visitors to feel nostalgic and for younger visitors to grasp how far we have come in this field.
This is a walkthrough of our final mock-up. Please watch with sound on for the full experience!
This prototype was created in the Sims 4 since the physical space was just as important as the digital touchpoints. The Sims allowed us to showcase this, with other touchpoints added in in post-production.
We began with this leading question to determine what direction we wanted to take with this project. Starting with preliminary research, we educated ourselves on the history of nearly all music players that have existed, observing which technologies had the most interesting stories, histories, or features that we may want to include in our museum design. Through this, we settled on four original ideas for interactive touchpoints:
These ideas had us excited, so each of us spent time researching important facets of each touchpoint to adequetly understand the scope we were trying to achieve.
With this information, we were then better able to narrow down which devices in particular we wanted to focus on. While originally the timeline would consist of all music playing devices we could find, this ended up being unfeasible as there were far more than we originally expected. Therefore, we simplified the scope of our touchpoints to four different music players: the gramophone, jukebox, boombox, and Walkman. These devices were chosen because they each had something unique to represent in the history of music technology.
Each team member assigned themselves to work on a touchpoint or two, and mine were the two ideas I generated: the immersive context rooms and sound quality. My further research for these topics can be found below.
As we continued our many rounds of research, we also began sketching out concepts and ideas for each of our touchpoints. These concepts were then used to create our mid-fidelity prototype.
This is a sketch I created that includes some preliminary ideas for the immersive context rooms. I began this before we officially decided which devices we were focusing on, so one of the included eras is the modern one, which never ended up making it in our exhibit.
While it would be difficult to fully represent what these rooms looked like in sketches, I wanted to create a way to showcase all of our work so far as we planned to concept test our designs with users.
To effectively create a mock-up that showed the details and scale of our concepts while also not swallowing too much of our time, I came up with a creative way to display our designs: through Minecraft. The entirety of this design was by me. Below is the video walkthrough of this prototype.
This prototype shows the touchpoints and solidified layout for the exhibit. As we realized a timeline would no longer be feasible, that historic education aspect became collages of advertisements, use cases, and diagrams of how each system worked.
Then, armed with that knowledge, they would enter the immersive rooms that would show what kind of environment that device would be used in, with ambient sounds playing from hidden speakers.
The boombox display would be unique, with a large screen that would display a replica of a boombox that users could interact with, giving instructions on how to use this device,
Within each of the immersive rooms, visitors would find stylized cards that could be used to activate the kiosks in the final room. There, visitors could scan their cards to unlock the ability to play any song from the approved list at the museum with a sound quality reminiscent of the original device.
With this prototype available, we were able to test our ideas with other students in our class, as well as users who have experience with museum layouts that could assist us in co-designs. From this user input, we identified many highlights and areas of improvement.
Common sentiments we heard were:
These insights were invaluable to the iteration of our project. We made changes to resolve each of these issues, conducting further research to properly understand the context in which each device is used, what the device sounded like, and the history and creation of the devices.
With all of this, we were able to begin designing our final prototype. My personal contribution to this was creating the simulated sound of each device as if it was played on the devices we chose. To listen to all of these variations, click here. I also did all the video editing for the final walkthrough, including finding and adding the sounds for all immersive context rooms and adding all the different components from my teammates.
Below is some further information about each touchpoint.
While there were some massive benefits to creating our prototype on the Sims, it also made it difficult to combine all of our touchpoints together in an effective way without the video editing present in the current demonstration. Ideally, our next steps would be to create this prototype in our real world, allowing users to visit it and give us feedback. However, there are far more logistics to this than are currently possible to implement.
This was a project I particularly enjoyed because of its open-ended nature. While I typically thrive in situations with rules, having such free reign of how to create this interactive exhibit was an incredibly fun and educational expression of my creativity. I took on quite a few roles throughout the duration of this project, seeing what it was like from every perspective as we created it. Many of my tasks, such as audio and video editing, fell to me because of my previous novice experience in such things. I am very glad to have branched out in my past to see various facets of creative expression, which coalesced into being confident enough to edit our final prototype video all on my own.
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