For my last year in my masters program (HCID) we have to complete a 1 year long capstone (thesis) project. In thinking about what I might want to design, I’ve come up with the following problem space:
Local music in a digital age
When I was growing up, I was very much into local music. Back then the internet was still pretty slow but people were getting some music digitally. At the time I was doing concert photography for many local bands. I would show up at venues and photograph all day some times. This really put me deep inside the local music scene in Indianapolis. I knew most of the band members, I was friends with the sound guys, the venue owners, promoters, etc. Most people knew who I was. While part of this community I was exposed to tons of new music, both local and non-local. It was a really great experience for me.
Then digital music exploded. Piracy of music became normal and iTunes changed the music distribution system. In no small way there was a huge paradigm shift of how people consumed music. Many great things came from this. Now we can listen to music from all around the world, we have access to more music than ever, and we have this access almost all the time. However, I think something was lost in local music scenes. There was a stronger community before the digital explosion, but it shrunk or disappeared almost completely.
I think there can be a melding of the two worlds. I want to look at ways to bring local music (the community, scene, etc) into the digital age. A way for people to participate in local music scenes, listen to local music, enjoy the culture of local music, share local music, and find new local (and non-local) music.
So, over the next 9 months I will be working within this problem space. Keep an eye out on my blog for more updates as they come out. And as always, I welcome comments and critiques of any of my posts and designs.



So, I’ve been thinking a lot of process, especially about how critique fits into process both in academia and in the workplace. In academia we are constantly pushed to have our work critiqued, which is absolutely fantastic. However, what I failed to realized, despite all my preaching about getting feedback and critique as often as possible, is that in academia critique comes to you. Often times it simply wasn’t necessary to go out and explicitly ask for critique for someone. Someone was constantly around, and usually looking over your shoulder. They would just walk up and say what they thought. This is absolutely fantastic, but it’s unlike the real world which I’ve experience here at Mozilla. While we work strongly in teams, we often perform a lot of work on our own. This work happens at our own desk on our own computers. While working at our desk, everyone at the same time, it’s very unlikely that someone is just going to come up and start talking about what you are working on at that very moment. Sure people come by your desk and talk, and once in a while it’s relevant to the stuff you were working on that particular moment. But often, it’s not. This means that the work you are performing right now is being looked at by you, and likely only you. Despite our somewhat deepest fears, our colleagues are not looking over our shoulders. No one is peeping at our computers secretly judging us and see how many times we log into twitter and facebook. It’s just not happening for the majority of us, especially in our field.