Design Process

Currently, massive amounts of listening history data are captured as a byproduct of people’s use of digital streaming services, yet end users have very little access to these personal digital histories. How can reflection on personal histories of digital music listening be supported through the design of a new kind of music player? Olly is a music player that occasionally, yet indefinitely randomly selects songs from a person’s past, making them available to be re-experienced while subtly indicating how deep in the past they are coming from.

Early on, we knew we wanted to use actuation and rotation to signal to the user that Olly had selected a song from their past as a technique while not immediately playing it. Our goal was for Olly to move in and out of perceptual view in everyday life — immediately playing a song from your past would be disruptive. We found rotation offered a subtle way to express Olly had a song available to be played if desired. As our design process continued, we realized rotation also offered a rich technique to subtly express the relative age of the song being surfaced from your listening history (e.g., the slower the rotation, the deeper in your past).

We created a custom control board that allowed us to supplying different voltage levels to the motor driving Olly’s rotating internal disc. 4.4V - 12V offered a range of voltage levels to express different rotational speeds representing how deep or recent in one’s past the song that’s being surfaced comes from.

Olly’s enclosure is comprised of anodized aluminium and pressure treated mahogany wood veneer to create a durable, long-lasting quality of finish.

Interaction Design

Olly’s central feature is its internal wooden disc encircled in aluminum. When a song is randomly selected and surfaced from the past, it is not immediately played. First, the disc begins rotating to subtly indicate a song has been selected and is available to be played. The speed of the rotation is relative to how deep into the past the song was listened to by Olly’s owner (e.g., the deeper into the past, the slower the rotational speed). To play the song, the owner must tangibly spin the rotating disc. If the song is not played within a brief time window, Olly will abandon it and stop spinning until another song is eventually surfaced. Olly randomly selects approximately 9 songs per week and this process continues indefinitely into the future.

Long-Term Field Study

Study Goals

We aimed to investigate new ways that people could engage with their massive digital music listening history archives through a slower, ongoing form of interaction.

Research Process

We hand crafted a small batch of 3 Olly research products that were deployed and studied in 3 separate households for 15 months. Each Olly contained years (if not over a decade) of the user’s personal digital music listening history.

Outcomes & Implications

We designed Olly to explore how its slow pace and temporal expressiveness could foster long-term engagement with participants’ personal music listening history data. Findings showed that Olly became part of people's daily lives, supporting various experiences beyond direct interactions, while deepening their attachment to both their music data and Olly itself. This work underscores the need for future research on technologies that embrace novel constraints, operate autonomously, and prioritize experiences before and after interaction, as well as during direct engagement.

In this project we challenge normative assumptions in technology design, such as creating always-on, attention-demanding devices, by crafting highly resolved design artifacts that offer a tangible sense of future possibilities. This approach aims to not only question design norms but also envision and explore real alternatives for engaging with technology differently. As technology increasingly shapes everyday experiences, we emphasize the need to critically examine mundane activities, like listening to digital music, to reassess the adequacy and desirability of current design practices.