Press Release
Silver A' Design Award in Interface, Interaction and User Experience Design Goes to Musiac Music Recommendation Service by Chia-Min Lin
The international grand jury of the 2019 - 2020 A' Design Award & Competition recognizes Chia-Min Lin for interface, interaction and user experience design
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
COMO, Italy, April 22, 2020 /DesignNewswire/ A' Design Award & Competition has confirmed the Silver A' Design Award in the Interface, Interaction and User Experience Design category for Musiac Music Recommendation Service by Chia-Min Lin, designed for LinStudio. The award was conferred within the 2019 - 2020 A' Design Award & Competition and was determined through blind peer review by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members, who evaluated anonymized entries against predetermined criteria.
What the Silver A' Design Award Means
The Silver A' Design Award celebrates top-tier designs that embody excellence and innovation. This award acknowledges creations that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also highly functional, reflecting the designer's deep understanding and skill. Silver A' Design Award recipients are recognized for their contribution to raising industry standards and advancing the practice of design. Their work often incorporates original innovations and elicits a strong emotional response, making a notable impact on the improvement of everyday life.
More About Musiac Music Recommendation Service
Musiac is a musical recommendation engine, utilize proactive participation to find precise options for its users. It aims to propose alternative interfaces to challenge the algorithm autocracy. Information filtering has become an inevitable searching approach. However, it creates echo chamber effects and constrains users in their comfort zone by strickly follow their preferences. Users become passive and stop questioning the options the machine provides. Spending time to review options may increase huge bio-cost, but it is the effort that creates a meaningful experience.
About Chia-Min Lin
Chia Min Lin is a quiet yet rigorous and evolving designer. She dedicates to challenging traditional design thinking by embracing systematic and holistic perspectives. She has studied both cybernetics and aesthetic. Her works focus on highlighting the in-between-relationships since how human think/act interests her. From her point of view, design is never about a trend or a style. It's a language of how we interpret the world around us.
Award Record
With this recognition, Chia-Min Lin is a winner of 1 A' Design Award.
About the A' Interface, Interaction and User Experience Design Award
The A' Interface Design Award is an international design competition recognizing good user interface designs by the best UI/UX designers worldwide. It is organized within the A' Design Award & Competition and is open to interface designers, interaction designers, user experience designers and digital product designers from all countries. Typical entries include websites, mobile applications, software interfaces, game interfaces, wearable interfaces and virtual reality interfaces. The awarded interface designs are published at https://designers.org/design-category/interface
About A' Design Award & Competition
Organized annually since 2008, A' Design Award & Competition is an international, juried design accolade. The competition is open to entries from all countries. The philanthropic mission of the A' Design Award is to advance society through good design, by recognizing and promoting superior products, projects and services that benefit society, and by creating a global awareness and appreciation for good design practices and principles. Nominations are peer reviewed and evaluated anonymously by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members against predetermined criteria such as functionality, ergonomics, engineering, presentation, innovation, usability, sustainability and technology, with score normalization applied to remove biases. Awards are conferred at Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron levels. Eligible laureates receive the A' Design Prize, which includes the award trophy, the certificate of design excellence, the hardcover yearbook, a lifetime license to use the A' Design Award winner logo, exhibition of awarded works, an invitation to the gala night and award ceremony in Italy, inclusion in the World Design Rankings and Designer Rankings, and public relations and publicity services. Registration, uploading a work and receiving a preliminary score are free of charge, and Professional and Digital Edition laureates are not contractually obliged to pay further fees to claim the A' Design Prize. More information is available at https://competition.adesignaward.com
Press Resources
- Winner Page: https://designers.org/91014
- A' Design Award Page: https://competition.adesignaward.com/91014
- Media Showcase: https://www.designnewsroom.com/!91014
- Laureate Profile: https://designers.org/d/257687
Media Contact
Giulia Ferrari, Press Office
Designers.Org
Via Leone Leoni 32, 22100 Como, Italy
press@designers.org
+39 031 4491953
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Fact Sheet
The Work
- Project
- Musiac Music Recommendation Service
- Function
- Music Recommendation Service
- Category
- Interface, Interaction and User Experience Design
- Discipline
- Communication Design
- Industry
- Software
- Colors
- Black, Dark Slate Gray, Silver, Lavender and Dark Gray
- Images
- 5
- Client
- LinStudio
The Recognition
- Laureate
- Chia-Min Lin
- Country
- United States of America
- Recognition
- Silver A' Design Award
- Edition
- 2019 - 2020
- Design ID
- #91014
Credits
- Image Credits
- All materials required in this project doesn't need attributions. Licenses are attached in the documentation appendix.
Design Details
- Unique Properties
- Musiac is a music recommendation service aims to provide better selection mechanism. It uses a contour map to represent all musical genres in a single interface, showing the relationship across songs and genres in a 2D space. It maps out a taste bubble from the user's playlists, separating the user's prior musical taste field from the unexplored musical territory. The user can change the outline of the bubble by dragging it and expanding the scope of the recommendation algorithm.
- Inspiration
- Musiac started with a simple notion. Interface is the tangent point between our perception and reality. I believe interface reflects a subtle world of why we make choices. I ran into a website called Every Noise at Once and found it's a perfect database to test my theory. Interface has a higher-level goal of helping us to process information better. I want to design something that goes beyond data visualization and empower users to be more proactive upon the world they're seeing.
- Research
- Musiac ran with a waterfall and agile hybrid methodology: research, framing, prototype, test, and reflecting. Feedback was collected along the way and therefore, multiple iterations. I did solid case studies, interviewed active and passive music online streaming users, and consulted with programmers to finalize the proper frame of this project. Multiple user testings with a clickable prototype were performed in-person, as well as online.
- Challenge
- The most difficult part of this project is to find an industry professional to talk to me. Online streaming service is a very competitive field. Hence, business and advertising dominate the final result of music recommendations, which creates intransparent and unethical algorithms. Academics and scholars provide enthusiastic feedback, but one of the business executives cancel his help after he saw my questions list. Another major research constrains is the fuzzy relationships of million users' playlists. Single users' taste bubble might not accommodate with the overarching dimensions, even though the machine could easily map his or her playlists into an individual lump.
- Realization and Technology
- Musiac learns from "Every Noise at Once", has a virtual database, a theoretical possible algorithmically-generated map, and an ethical interface to reduce the bio-cost of finding liked songs from enormous options. It starts with a study of recommendation engines and filters, interviews, and a pre-testing, then ideates with "what if" questions along the generative design process, run through 2 round of user-testing to validate initial concepts and iterates. The project took a year to finalize.
- Operation and Interaction
- Musiac is a desktop application with an unusual interface, allows users to control the scope of recommendations and to manipulate the filtered results. It uses a bubble to separate the unexplored genres from the familiar genres. A user could easily change the shape of the bubble to expand the recommendation source. It also provides multiple filters, such as themes with different adjectives; numbers of views, finding songs with specific traits, and a guiding system to go beyond the comfort zone.
- Project Duration and Location
- Musiac was a one year project done in 2018, Detroit.
- Specifications
- Musiac is a desktop application. It requires a user to import his/her playlists of third-party apps to build the "Taste Bubble" at the beginning. The bubble sits on an algorithmically-generated genres map, with a horizontal (electric, acoustic) and a vertical (atmospheric, bouncier) indication. The bubble separates the familiar and unexplored territory for a user so he/she could expand the recommendation (temporarily), without changing their behavior.
- Keywords
- Algorithm autocracy, Ethical interface, Information architecture, Data visualization, User empowerment, Collaborative filtering
