Building tech products with meaningful materiality
Tech devices such as smartphones, laptops and e-book readers have become central to the day-to-day lives of millions of people, yet they are often seen as highly replaceable commodities. In a previous project, we found this comes down to the fact that people are assigning personal meaning to the digital components of their devices (such as apps, photos and messages) but not the physical device itself. This project explored the potential for designers to play a role in shifting the ways consumers value their tech devices to extend product lifetimes.
Research Question
How can designers create tech products that users will cherish and keep for longer?
Project Outcome
The design of Melo, a personalised music player.
Procedure
In this project, I worked collaboratively with Andrew, a 54-year-old avid music listener to co-design a new type of digital music player that would be valued as a cherished device.
A series of in-depth interview sessions were conducted with Andrew to develop an understanding of his lifelong appreciation for music (5 hours total).
Sessions included several activities exploring potential design directions for the project to take including association cards, mood boards and affinity mapping.
A prototype design was given to Andrew for testing over a 1 month evaluation period.
“music is the thing (or the place) in my life
where I go [...] to have a good time”
Developing personal music categories from Andrew's digital music library.
Activities used to translate personal memories of music into visual and material properties to inform the design process.
Mood boards developed for each of the personal music categories from Andrew's digital music library.
Design
Melo is a personalised music player that uses interactive objects to select between songs for playback within the user's digital music library. Each of the 4 objects can be placed on the central platform to begin playing a category of music within Andrew’s digital library. The aesthetic style of each object is designed to reflect Andrew’s memories of the music it plays.
Plast: An object used to play music from Andrew’s youth.
Ember: An object used to play Andrew’s storytelling music.
Joey: An object used to play Andrew’s punk-rock music.
Hide: An object used to play Andrew’s country music.
Melo: A personalised music player.
Technical components of Melo: A raspberry Pi 3, RFID reader and sound card.
Experimenting with various materials and finishes.
Key Insights
Physical devices (such as music players) can become valued belongings by adopting aesthetic and functional cues that link the device with meaningful usage experiences (such as listening to a favourite album).
Creating a design with cues to personal media requires knowledge of how the user perceives various product properties (that is, how the user thinks of different colours, materials, shapes, textures and interactions).