The concept created with team members Serena Ren and Iroha Shirai at Rehack, a reverse-hackathon focused on redesigning tech in a more socially responsible way (https://rehack.co/).

We had 6 hours to build a prototype in response to the competition's theme: creating solutions to combat depression, loneliness, and inauthenticity of technology in four sectors: consumer media, social networks, productivity tools, and sharing economy.

We focused on consumer media, specifically the social side of music experience on applications like Spotify. Today's music experience is both a personal and social experience.  Attending concerts can be an incredible event, but after the night is over, that's it. Personal music listening experience allows us to create our own private worlds, but it has also created social barriers – go on a subway ride, more than half of the passengers have earphones plugged in – making initiating conversation seem disruptive.

Below I introduce our initial concept and my own redesign. My goal with the redesign was to create a flushed out prototype including key design decisions to improve the user experience.  

A. Initial Concept

In the span of 6 hours we developed our idea and prototype: we developed a Spotify plug-in that allows users to sync their listening experience with others around them. The listener can also switch his/her listening experience to public for others to join in.