SPOT
A different take on creating music trough physical interaction, providing endless possiblities
SPOT was an Industrial Design assignment about exploring Intuitive and aesthetic interaction. It is about exploring interaction by using physical prototypes, which is why SPOT is not functional, but merely a mock up to demonstrate interaction. We chose to create an interactive Spotify playing interface. This became SPOT. SPOT is a minimalistic looking device that consists out of a round base with a rotatable lever with a single knob. The lever features a display showing the current song playing.
Our main goal was making it intuitive, a user should understand how to use this design on first notice. We limited ourselves in using aesthetic interactions. This led us to designing a very physical interaction Intuitive interactions were: Turning on/off (by flipping over the lever to show the knob and display), Changing volume (by turning the only know on the device), Browsing playlists (by turning the lever left and right) and skipping songs (by adjusting the height of the lever, which slowly drops down during a playlist).
However the way playlists were organised did call for an aesthetic interaction. We decided to put energetic music to the right and relaxing music to the left which does require some knowledge that isn’t inherently intuitive.
Our Design proposition relates to the frogger framework of S.A.G. Wensveen, J.p.Djajadiningrat and C.J. Overbeeke. We tried to combine feedforward and feedback in such a way that our product conveys “This is a music player and this is how I use it”.
Above is an overview of feedback and feedforward in SPOT. SPOT looks like a record player and has very obvious speaker holes conveying it is a music player. The lever nearly screams to be lifted, and reveals the other functions SPOT offers when it is brought to an “on” state.
To enrich the interaction SPOT offers we made a point of coupling the action to the function. This, in my opinion, calls for a physical interaction, as it allows a user to use all senses to interact instead of only the audio-visual.
