Synopsis

This paper investigates how shared control over music playlists affects social interaction and community among co-located users. We created two music control boxes: one allowing song skips only, and another with options to swap songs for one of the same album or artist. A mixed-subject experiment (N=27) compared these to a no-control baseline, assessing social connectedness and team performance. Results showed that shared music control enhances user empowerment, communication, and interaction, fostering discussions about diverse music tastes and enabling emotional sharing. These findings suggest future collaborative music systems should focus on facilitating shared control to promote greater social interaction and connectedness among users.

Reflection

Most of my designs are quite reliant on the context in which they would ultimately be placed. This made me prioritize field deployments through most of my studies. Within this course, we have taken a lab approach, which changed my perspective on the approach immensely. When done correctly, it can actually provide you with a quite clear picture of how a product would be used in real life. Lab testing is now another way of product validation in my tool belt, which I can use to quickly validate early stage concepts.