Design Process

How will personal digital music archives be meaningfully experienced as they grow to a size and scale that people have never previously experienced? Music listening history archives can be vast, invisible, and overwhelming. Olo Radio’s design features a rich, yet highly minimal set of controls. By adopting this design strategy, we crated a physical interface that is simple while providing a wide range of interaction possibilities.

We created a custom control board that integrates a capacitive touch chip, motor driver, and voltage regulator to interface with a Raspberry PI and enable the slide to provide rapid input and output as it is interacted with.

Olo’s case is comprised of powder coated sheet metal and mahogany wood to create a long-lasting, high quality finish.

All design choices aimed to evoke an aesthetic that references vintage stereo receivers, while departing enough to suggest that Olo Radio is a new kind of music player.

Interaction Design

Olo Radio explores different temporal interaction modalities to enable the user to interact with music from their past through both chronological (Life) and non-chronological (Day, Year) timeframe modes. Different modes can be selected and toggled by the knob next to the motorized linear slider. The specific position of the slider is encoded to a specific ‘point in time’ in the user’s past that is relative to the timeframe mode. Olo Radio allows for listening across time, seasons, and years of one’s life in ongoing, evolving ways.

Long-Term Field Study of Olo Radio

Study Goals

We aimed to ① Investigate the reflective potentialities of personal data for memory-oriented music listening as well as ② empirically explore conceptual propositions related to slow technology.

Research Process

We hand crafted a small batch of 6 Olo Radio research products and put 5 into 5 separate households for 8 months. Each Olo Radio contained years (if not over a decade) of the user’s personal digital music listening history.

Outcomes & Implications

Developing strategies to design everyday technologies that express representations of digital data that meaningfully evolve and change over time presents important opportunities and challenges. Through a critical reflection on findings emerging across our design and study of Olo Radio, we highlight challenges that come with this emerging space and insights into how they could be better grappled with in design research and practice.

Olo Radio Short Documentary Film

The Design Research Works documentary film team visited the Homeware Lab to create a short film documenting the Olo Radio design.