Ⅵ. Discussion and Implications
6.3 Designing for Indirect Restriction of Participation
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In this section, we will discuss implications for music playing and sharing experience in public, focusing on the data physicalization of music consumption and a new design space through understanding the role of medium for personal expression and public participation.
6.1 Co-creation of Physical Traces in Public
Designing for actively engaging interaction through the physicalization of data has been an ongoing area of interest in the HCI community. Recent studies have revealed that everyday interaction with physicalized personal data might motivate natural behavior change through self-reflection (Ju et al.
2019, Thudt et al. 2018). In this paper, we chose a café as an observational space because we anticipated that it would be a space for people to discover changes in their perceptions of space and further develop personal attachment to the space by using Camue. In a series of field studies, participants remarked that the ticket remnants from other customers gave an individual sense of contribution to the public space by playing music they wanted to share, raising interest about music played in the space and at the same time motivating them to engage with Camue. Also, the remnants allowed the café owner to recall and then reflect on customers who used Camue and the music they played. In this respect, we found that Camue helped users not only to change the space’s music but also to leave physical traces of their participation by playing songs from their favorite genres.
The traces visualized the invisible, abstract experience of playing and sharing music, allowing users to perceive “how long a song has been played” by showing a paper ticket being shredded as well as the song being played through the transparent part of Camue. Moreover, the accumulated traces demonstrated “how many people participated” through the volume of remnants; it also gave visual evidence that implied “how the musical mood of a particular space had been formed.” In other words, remnants of tickets were able to express the quantity and kind of the music consumed and shared in a specific space. While space, in our case a café, has been mostly interpreted by café owners as commercial space, in our study, the café customers had the opportunity to reinterpret the space more actively by participating in Camue’s interaction loop. From what we mentioned in the findings, this opportunity introduced a new way of adding value to the space by allowing the users to rethink their previous image of the café.
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Figure 22. Various color of shredded tickets indicates the genre of the music
In addition, because a café is a space that consists of individuals or small groups who create private spheres, the space’s atmosphere may limit the range of musical genres that will be played.
Accordingly, there is a need for a design that mediates between participation of playing and sharing music with contemplation of song selections and expressing participants’ song tastes in public spaces.
Camue’s interaction process seemed to affect users’ consideration of the ethics of song selection, but the unified visual (e.g., genre, artist) of the remnants of the shredded tickets may add new value to publicly created music and the perception of the space. In other words, co-creation of remnants made by the public can give the user a better understanding of the space and further allow the space to be characterized as a space for sharing specific music.
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6.2 Mediation between Self-expression and Public Participation
As mentioned by Storteboom’s study (2017), we could also confirm that it was difficult to avoid that explicit individual’s music playing in a public place can make others feel offended. During the experiment, one participant selected fast-beat hip-hop music that was quite different from the existing musical mood of the café (e.g., calm music within the genre of indie, ballade).
We noticed that such a personal selection made the café owner or other customers feel uncomfortable with the sudden change of mood caused by the song. In this context, Camue, a product that enables individual expression in public places, has been challenged to coordinate tensions between expressing personal taste and participation in music that will not disturb the mood of the public space. We attempted to overcome this challenge with a new interaction loop through Camue, which provides several steps that could enable users to think and reflect on their song selection, materializing the invisible “participation,” and makes the users’ song ticket irreversible by destroying it after the participation. Based on Camue’s design considerations and our findings from the study, we propose the following factors in designing products that enable personal expression in public places.
First, the design is needed to provide a moment to think about the personal media selection and playing process. As shown in our findings, writing the song information directly on paper with a pen gave the user the opportunity to spend more time thinking about the song selection. The process of shredding the paper song tickets during the music’s play time and the shredded remnants are considered to permit the consumption of certain media played according to the user’s taste through physical visualization. This experience enables users to reflect on what people think about the songs they request in the space and induces people to consider the possible negative consequences (e.g., the ethics of unmatched song selections in a café) when choosing a song.
The second factors are that (1) the form, in terms of styling design of an object, might need to be inspired by everyday tools (e.g., frames) so that a designer can incorporate its characteristics or unique aspects into the designed object, and (2) the application of embodied knowledge and actions (e.g., writing on paper) that one can use to design interaction with everyday tools for providing an intuitive interaction to the users. This suggests that designers could leverage various knowledge and behaviors that are experienced and learned with everyday objects. By doing so, designers can evoke curiosity and excitement and provide better engagement with the designed object so that they can lead the users to interact with the object in a more desirable way, as it is meant to be experienced. This approach can also lower the technical or cultural barriers for users to experience the new interactive device, especially in a public space, where there is more chance for users to be embarrassed or to get
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lost in the interaction loop than in a private space. In addition, as Gaver et al. (2004) suggested, there is a possibility that the user experience of the digital interface with non-digital actions may provide a playful experience. This is particularly important in designing an interaction loop because it generates the honeypot effect as successful engagement and “seemingly” playful experience can motivate other people in the same space to start interacting with the object (Zajonc 1965).
The third factor is applying physical irreversibility to the medium (Pierce and Paulos 2015) for the restriction of public participation. The use of a paper material, such as a song ticket in our study, as a medium of participation is meaningful for physically representing the action of participation in the public space. Irreversibly destroying the material allows the user to clearly perceive the consumption of participation through various media (e.g., music). Thus, it is possible to induce responsible, ethical, and considerate decision-making when selecting and sharing music in a public space with strangers.
We found that, in line with a study that argued for ephemeral consumption of physical music, contents allowed careful selection of music (Kim et al. 2019). This could naturally raise barriers to one’s repeated and indiscriminate use of a product that can inflict a negative experience on others in public spaces. This may increase the value of music participation in public and the focus on the users’
experience.
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6.3 Designing for Indirect Restriction of Participation
Although in our study, the exposure of the subject of public participation with Camue reduced the number of inconsiderate music selecting situations, some thoughtless or unethical song selections could occur because there was not a direct or indirect message delivered to the customers on the choice of songs/genres allowed when using Camue.
In spaces like cafés, privately owned public spaces, the owner’s rules come first, and he or she has the right to enforce the rules (Pozos-Brewer, 2015). The participation through Camue supported the building of co-created song ticket traces and further promoted the users to change their perception of the space. There is a need for a way to understand each owner and customer, which should not lean toward one’s needs over those of the other. That is, rather than direct restrictions of music by the owner, the color of traces can indirectly deliver a genre restriction for song selection (e.g., blue tickets only for jazz). Furthermore, we expect that a certain mood or vibe for the music that fits the space would be formed over time, and that could be visualized through the shredded traces. If those physical traces illustrate the most played music genre of the space through patterns or a percentage of colors, it could provide implicit messages as a social signifier (Norman 2013), evoking new interpretations of the behavior of others in the space for users who first faced the artifact for music participation.
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