Abstract
This human-centred Constructive Design Research study explores how interaction design can be applied to improve digital, musical collaboration for musicians, particularly in remote collaborations. It utilises Activity Theory and Engeström’s (1987) Activity System Model in efforts to frame the research and understand the behaviours, motivations and contexts of musical collaboration. In doing so, it rigorously documents and considers the experience of musicians in their musical collaborative endeavours, found in the research section of the design project. The research section conducts and analyses 6 expert interviews as well as a collaboration workshop, in which 2 musicians are tasked to collaboratively create a piece of music remotely. Following is the strategy section, in which I document how I came to devise a strategy of improving the collaboration experience of musicians. The strategy addresses the culture of collaboration by aiding musicians in developing a shared creative intention with their collaborators for the music they desire to create. Specifically, I make use of a minimum viable HCD strategy (Rumelt, 2013), experience model (Fenn & Hobbs, 2017) and value proposition canvas (The Value Proposition Canvas, 2021) to do so. The following section explores creative solutions which seek to apply that strategy through digital artefacts with various ideations, sketches and storyboards – eventually explicating the chosen solution which centres on helping musicians build collections of aesthetic multimedia (but primarily musical) references in their collaborative teams. This study then documents the design process for a prototype in extensive detail, including user journeys, task flows, wireframes and high-fidelity mockups. The final section of the design project tests the prototype with users, considering its usability but also iterating on several promising ideas generated during testing. I then move onto an evaluating the design project according to Zimmerman et al.’s (2007) 3 criteria for evaluating Constructive Research Design studies - namely innovation, meaning and extensibility. The evaluation considers the physical and theoretical contributions of the study in the form of the prototype, the limited ability of communication technologies for communicating complex emotions and experiences and the value of establishing shared understanding in creative collaborations.