Walk for music

Brief

Design a way for people to discover the cultural richness of the City of London

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Developing critical approaches to design of digital interfaces.

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Experimenting with new technologies and methods for creative exploration in information design.

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Designing and building interactive systems that respond to human contexts.

Partner

Culture Mile, UK

www.culturemile.london

Team

Winnie Wong

Nancy Obeid

Traice Yang

Lulu Fang

DURATION

10 weeks

Our focus

Our focus is on building a "Creative Placemaking" idea that helps people relate more and feel a sense of belonging to the Culture Mile area. 

From our research, we realized that the office workers are the potential audience group. They work every weekday but they didn't engage with the area much. Therefore, how to make them civically engaged and care about the area has emerged as our main focus. 

idea

The whole Culture Mile area is surrounded by music and art. And our target audiences’ need is to escape from offices and change their senses during lunchtime. Therefore, we planned to play music on the bridge in order to light up their mood when they are passing by the bridge. Since workers are passing by quickly during lunchtime. We add some interactions to let people engage with the bridge and play the music together. 

How it works?

When there is one person walking on the bridge, the speaker will only start playing one instrument, like the key melody. When more people pass by, more instruments will be added to the music according to voice types. So if there are enough people on the bridge, it will feel like they are all playing a concert together.

Primary research

Behavioral observations and interviews were done in the Culture Mile area. We found out that there were lots of office workers going through the Barbican area during lunchtime. Especially, they walked through the Gilbert Bridge, Barbican. Moreover, most of them were carrying some food. They said that they were heading to the White Cross Market for lunch. And they prefer to go out for lunch because they want to have some fresh air and sunshine to relax. 

ideation

We did some brainstorming and storyboards of some potential designs. After that, we used the speed dating method to test our ideas. We found that like our research findings, workers are curious about the music, which played on the bridge.

Prototyping 

For doing the prototype and making our idea more complete, we used the midi music and GarageBand to recreate the music and allocated the instrument based on the Voice type - High, middle and low. With all the separated soundtracks, we combined the coding and camera for detection. We also laser cut the cardboard for the phonograph. This type of horn not only amplifies the sound but also gives a sense of history, which can be well combined with the Barbican Centre and classical music.

USER TESTING

We set up the phonograph, music and detection on the Gilbert Bridge and record the audiences' reactions. Most of them will walk closely to the phonograph and hear the music. It showed their curiosity and engagement in this design. 

Final outcome

Our final design was set up at the school bridge. It consisted of camera detection, music, phonographs and branded posters.  We invited the clients, professors and classmates to experience. 

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For the future plan, we hope that the bridge can be a longstanding medium to engage people and promote different music-related content of Culture Mile by creating such interactions. It can be a music competition, concert promotion or live show. Therefore, we suggest decorating it with different musical themes and adapting it to more bridges in the Culture Mile area.

what's more

If you are interested to know more about this project, feel free to check out my blog. It documented the comprehensive process.

Also, if you are interested in Creative Placemaking, feel free to check out my critical evaluation of Creative Placemaking in UX design.