Collab Rooms

This project started out under the proposal of “A redesign of an economy based app, using fair-sharing principles, via design fiction”. The goal of this project has been to re-imagine the way musicians might collaborate together in the future, applying the principles of Design Fiction. The concept of music collaboration is pushed forward a few years in this project. The scenario it has been designed for is not too unrealistic when compared to modern collaboration techniques.

Currently, when people collaborate online to form a song; a common thing done is to upload music to a shared google drive, with everyone downloading and uploading their tracks to the drive. This project asks the question “What is that was opened up to everybody?” In essence, a website where anyone can create an account, upload their recordings, and anyone else with an account can then add to their recordings. To this end, what I created as my product was a “proof of concept” high-fidelity prototype for an online music collaboration site, designed under the idea of how music collaboration might be done ten or twenty years in the future. This was created using HTML, Javascript, CSS, & PHP.

The objective of this project have been to look at online music collaboration as it currently stands, and redesign how it will work at a future date. A high-fidelity prototype website, developed in HTML, is to be a proof of concept for the idea. This website is to be a place where musicians can upload their work for people to collaborate on, or for them to find the work of others to collaborate on. The thesis for this project discussed the ideas of Design Fiction in a literature review, further possible developments for the website if it was to go to full development, and how this idea being implemented would affect the way in which people create music.