Hello everyone, Will Odom here presenting the video preview of
our paper on behalf of my co authors.
So to explore and ground our own thinking in this emerging space,
we adopted a design led approach to create Olo Radio, which is a
robust interactive device that uses temporal metadata to embody
the lifetime of digital music that a person has previously
listened to.
An important part of a little radio design is that it syncs to
its owners laughter them account. And so if you don't
know what it is Last.FM is a free web based application that
runs across your computer, your smartphone, and other devices to
generate precise metadata records of each song.
Now we'd like to offer a very brief explanation of how Olo
Radio works and how it's designed.
So when Olo Radio is turned on, it begins playing very much like
a radio. If left untouched, it will continuously play music
slowly moving forward in time.
So there's three different timeframe modes for all radio
and each mode is a different way of organizing the sequence
through which Olo will play music from the users Last.FM
archive. So here featured is Life, which organizes all
listening instances in a linear timeline from oldest to most
recent. So this offers an easily recognizable chronological
approach to exploring and listening to music from one's
past.
Year organizes all listening instances by when in the year
you listen to your music, this can enable a different
historical, maybe even seasonal way of listening to music from
one's past.
Lastly, Day organizes your listening history based on the
time of day a song was listened to. This opens a space for
exploring the trajectory
So, for more details on the design, please see our paper and
a video demo provided at the link below.
We batch produced six Olo radios, two of each color.
And we conducted five simultaneous deployment studies
with five participants in different homes in Vancouver,
Canada. For eight months. All participants had Last.FM
archives and each Olo Radio was
With its owner's personal Last.FM account, we conducted bi
weekly interviews to understand our participants experiences
over time and conducted a final in depth interview at the
conclusion of the study.
So this is a snapshot of information about our five
participants, all participants had last FM archives that were
relatively large and relatively old. Interestingly, our
participants ages and the life stages they occupied when they
started their Last.FM archive, ranged from early teenagers to
young adults to adults, and the different life stages and
experiences that Olo Radio enabled them to connect back to
was surprising and often compelling as our study
unfolded. This was not necessarily something that we
expected or anticipated.
Because our participants voices really bring to life key
qualities of the Olo Radio design that these summaries in
no way do justice to.
As our study progressed, we found that older radio supported
two distinct kinds of experiences of anticipation,
subtle and active.
subtle forms of anticipation involve two phases first, often
before turning their solo radio on, participants would
manipulate the slider and timeframe knob to set a low
radio to a position in time, and anticipate what might be
revealed prior to hearing the music. And then second,
listening to the songs that played in the unique sequence
that was formed. Among other things, this led to anticipation
around how songs are the sequence might lead to a unique
narrative of their personal history across time. Our study
also revealed a range of anticipatory interactions with
other radio. These instances were also characterized by two
phases. So first one participants experience
an insight associated with a memory triggered by the song
that was currently playing often as they were kind of casually
listening to music, and then second, directly interacting
with Olo Radio to move across different timeframe modes to
explore that that song appeared in time where they anticipated
it would. There are some great examples in the paper
participants unexpectedly being transported back in time to very
specific experiences and prior life stages.
So in conclusion, we design and studied Olo Radio to explore how
a slow technology framing might support reflective, memory
oriented experiences with listening history data. Our
findings provide new insights into how a temporal frame can
give rise to unique ways of interacting with data tied to
one's personal history. They also detail how physical form
personal data, and computation can come together in a design
artifact to manifest a rich quality of co-evolution over
time. Ultimately, we hope our work can inspire future research
and design practice aimed at supporting and extending human
relations with technology over time.