From Fiction to Function: New article in the Computer Music Journal

I’m happy to announce that our new article entitled “From Fiction to Function: Imagining New Instruments Through Design Workshops” is now published and on the front cover of the Computer Music Journal! The article reports on design fiction workshops that we conducted with professional and expert musicians to envision new kinds of musical instruments and interfaces though a nonfunctional paper prototyping activity. Our primary results were twofold:

First, we reflect on the use of design fiction as a valuable method for generating new ideas for designing interaction, and suggest opportunities for formulating a general framework that can link early-stage ideation and non-functional prototyping with actionable design inputs.

Second, many of the ideas that emerged were distilled into a set of design specifications that we used to develop three new versions of an digital musical instrument called the Noisebox. To read more about the Noiseboxes, you can visit the project page and read our paper presented at the NIME conference about the instruments that came from the workshop design ideas.

On a personal note, it has taken a relatively long time for this work to come to publication, but I am proud the work we did here and hope that it is of value to others across HCI, design, and music technology communities. Many thanks and congratulations to my co-authors and mentors Marcelo M. Wanderley and Catherine Guastavino! 🥂