JINGYI LAI

Self-Thinking and Self-Learning:Designing a Personal Tool for Making Visual Music

This Major Research Project illustrates the Inclusive Design principle of “one-size-fits-one” through an exploration of the process of designing a prototype of Visual Music making tool to match the needs and capabilities of one user—myself. Through an auto-ethnographic self-exploration and self-analysis of my dual identities as an international student from China and a junior graphic designer, I discovered my needs and capabilities as user of visual music tools. Using this information, I reviewed three popular visual music tools, to arrive at features for a prototype tool for myself, supplemented by basic features gathered through literature review. With these features, I designed a prototype music visualization tool named MyTool with interface mock-ups. MyTool is an experiment for creating customized tools through self-study, which could urge designers of popular tools to create more flexible tools, thereby expanding the user community of visual music makers like myself and kicking in a virtuous cycle of inclusion in the context of visual music production and consumption. http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/469/