Design for Longevity - Ongoing use of Instruments from NIME 2010-14

Editor's Notes

• #2: today I'll present a series of considerations to design for longevity –which is how to design DMIs that are not set aside after a few performances I’ll do that by elaborating on comments we collected from a survey of NIME designers
• #3: The context is that of a national UK project “design for virtuosity” we are investigating how to design DMIs by reusing existing skills of musicians to provide them with a rapid path to virtuosity without years of retraining *** a related question is how to design DMI that successfully sustain long-term engagement we sometimes have the feeling that most of DMIs fail to this exam
• #4: this feeling was very well described by jorda more than 10 years ago and just a few editions of NIME ago this feeling was restated by mamedes (do not read) so, the first question of this paper is
• #5: *** what is actually going on with these DMI s– in particular those presented at nime? Our community acknowledged this limitation several frameworks were proposed to give a structure to the design of DMIs and hopefully help solving this issue- myself included none offered empirical observations on the precise factors that promote the uptake of an instrument We believe that some of these factors are directly connected with our daily exercise, so we come to the second point,
• #6: which specific design factors should DMI makers follow to facilitate a prolonged use of the instrument? What are the most common design “mistakes” that we make? we tried to answer to these questions with a bottom-up approach, asking directly to the DMI makers of 5 successive editions of NIME 10-14
• #7: We did not include papers from the last two editions we were interested in legacy, which requires maturity of a project. given the scope of our study we investigated only those DMIs specifcally intended for - solo human performers to play live in a concert-like setting and inteneded to be used on an ongoing basis so we inlcuded
• #8: and excluded insturments for machines or groups of people to perform toolkits and languages instruemtns not conceived for a concert setting ** In a few cases, the demarcation line was not clear. In these cases, we adopted a relaxed policy at the end…**
• #9: we sent a questionnaire to the main authors asking for general information - motivation current sate of the instrument reflections about their experience with their instrument aspects that they would have done differently
• #10: these 70 DMIs were considered for this study. clearly the figures that I am about to present you about the DMIs uptake fail to account for the DMIS of the authors that did not reply to our survey
• #11: especially because among these there are very successful examples (roli seabord, magic fiddle, alphasphere) but we mostly intended to measure the general temperature of the DMIs presented at NIME it's just a shame that we could not include these designers' experiences in our the design reccomendations
• #12: some general information first, *** the results indicate that the most common target user was the author themselves
• #13: This question was intended to restrict the scope of our investigations to those works which were intentionally created to be actually performed with, rather than being just research investigations
• #14: we excluded the papers whose motivations only belong to these greyed out entries also we excluded the 4 DMIs that were explicitly not intended to be used on a long-term basis 51 instrumetns survived
• #16: *** two thirds of those that are not working would require substantial work to be ready for performance.
• #17: almost 70% are not available, we have quite a similar figure about the information on the unit sold
• #18: A notable difference exists between iOS apps and other DMIs. The number of sales for iOS apps was really high. If we exclude iOS apps, only 5 DMIs sold at least one unit, 3 of which have been sold to more than one buyer.
• #19: one forth of the DMIs have been publicly performed 0 or 1 times more than half of them at most 5 times.
• #21: another of these left-dominant slides – almost half of the DMIs have been played by fewer than 3 musicians
• #22: finally there are more answers to the questionnaire that you might read in the paper this data confirm what has been recognised by members of our community Most of the DMIs that were originally intended to be performed on a long-term basis ended up being performed for a few exhibitions only.
• #23: The figures that I just presented in this section confirming what has been recognised by members of our community. Most of the DMIs that were originally intended to be performed on a long-term basis ended up being performed for a few exhibitions aonly.
• #24: This second part of the talk proposes reflections about practices and processes of instrument design. These reflections are modeled on DMI makers’ diagnoses of design issues that limited the uptake of the instruments and considerations about their ample uptake
• #25: An important element are the signature features The idiosyncratic attributes that the instrument offers that can either refer to the functionality or to the appearance of the DMI the aesthetic features (mentioned) look, feel, craftsmanship, woodworking, quality construction Having an idiosyncratic appearance also enables the DMI to stick out during a live performance and to be memorable ------
• #26: functional signature features are properties that are completely new or that go beyond what was achievable before or that fulfil a specific need one of the main functional signature feature is sound - as suggested by mcpherson: --- he found the lack of a signature sound to be an impediment to the uptake of the touchkeys, especially among composers
• #27: the second category of recommendations are about the user-xp several comments suggested centering the design on musicians' experience designing FAMILIAR insturments is essential several authros discussed the importance of offering an intuitive instrument based on traditional modes of interaction, for instance ***
• #28: Having a simple interaction also seems to favour the positive the uptake of DMIs for instance, the isomorphic design of Musix …
• #29: A long preparation time might discourage the musician to pick up the DMI. To this respect, hans said that although he does use the electrumpet in public it could be more. Reasons are that it is not ready *** despite this, the instrument has remained in use many years
• #30: The third point is the choice of technology. consensus suggesting to choose commonly available platforms to develop and distribute the DMI Mobile apps designers agreed that iOS is preferable as it have a solid user base that is receptive to new instruments Tangible DMI devs suggested to design for commonly available devices rather than creating new hardware or using less commonly available hardware they named typical audio platforms - as Axoloti9 , Bela10 [15], or Teensy11
• #31: most designers suggested the use of open-source software and hardware platforms (With the exception of those operating in the mobile domain) Sentu ̈rk elaborated that his Kinect-based interface would have been more enduring if it had been open-source:*** the sostainability factor seems very important and is confirmed by the answers to a question in our questionnaire, we asked designers what would they need to do to get it ready for performance?
• #32: this connects to the next reccomendatioon which is to use technology that is self-contained self- containedness means that you don’t need to connect it to a computer, thus it solves the issue of not knowing whether to update your sw or os because it can mess up your dmi // that is what Snyder said about the birl // ***
• #33: another important aspect is modularity, which allows the DMI to be more easily fixed, updated, and expanded modularity can be also applied to the very category of the instrument, wierenga said:
• #34: another category refers to the musical possibility that the DMI offers ownership, is a term previously used in NIME literature and refers to supporting unique playing through design snyder again backed this concept
• #35: the lack of subtle control in their DMI was mentioned as the cause of its limited uptake by some authors ( do not read)
• #36: the last set of recomendations are not about the interface itself but rather about the design process which is actually often ill-documented in nime submissions. // yesterday Ge ... (asked us to reflect on how do you want nime papers to be, I guess) the design process, the motivations should generally be a bit more described for documentary and scientific purposes the first reccomendation is to consider using participatory design, design approach that promotes the skills and experiences of the final users as resources for design so it suggests working with final users at early stages of design this approach was backed by some of NIME designers *** however, he also added that “many things that players said they would not like ,ended up being things they liked once I had implemented them and they were able to try them out. So I’m not sure how much stock I should give this feedback until I have testable prototypes”
• #37: this connects to the importance of making iteratives prototypes, as mamedes said
• #38: finally, another way to sense what the user response could be is doing some market analysis // especially for those more interested in widespread manufacturing and dissemination.
• #39: two final remarks the first is about the actual nature of this study
• #40: not a receipe book *** Rather, it should be intended as a repository of DMI creators’ reflections on their own practice, which we elaborated into practical design considerations. These considerations highlight factors that we all can use to make our designs more enduring, and pitfalls we can avoid.
• #41: a DMI can be discontinued but still be inspirational some of the DMIs are indeed discontinued in their original version but, nevertheless, they contributed by informing future work. // in academia, research papers rarely represent the final word on a subject; in contemporary composition, many pieces are not played more than once or twice. so *** Is non-continuation necessarily a sign of failure of DMIs?
• #42: with these questions I thank you for your attention, and in particular I want to thanks all the authors that dedicated time to answer to the questionnaire with very insightful comments They helped us publishing this paper but moreover I believe the passing on of their XP is to the gain of the community