Co-designing for Co-listening - Conceptualizing Young People's Social and Music-Listening Practices

Authors: Michael Stewart
Year: 2018

Co-designing for Co-listening - Conceptualizing Young People's Social and Music-Listening Practices

Summary

The paper studies how 26 semi-rural U.S. children aged 9-15 keep in touch, listen to music, and imagine technologies for synchronous remote co-listening. Using semi-structured interviews, design charrettes, and testing of the Colisten prototype, the authors found that participants valued music and social connection but did not commonly use existing systems for co-listening or music recommendation. Participant designs surfaced five design dimensions for co-listening systems: initiation, group composition, control, hardware, and activity prioritization. The findings suggest that limited co-listening reflects gaps in available sharing designs more than lack of interest.

Important Keywords

  • Co-listening: listening to music together as a social practice, whether physically together or mediated by technology.
  • Young people: the participant group whose social and music-listening practices ground the design work.
  • Music listening: the everyday activity through which participants manage identity, mood, relationships, and social connection.
  • Sociality: the ways music listening supports being with, relating to, and communicating with others.
  • Keeping in touch: using music-related practices to maintain relationships across distance or changing situations.
  • Semi-rural youth: the context of young people whose social opportunities and mobility shape listening practices.
  • Design charrette: a collaborative design session used to generate and explore concepts with participants.
  • Colisten prototype: the prototype developed to explore shared, synchronous music listening.
  • Synchronous listening: people listening to the same music at the same time as a shared experience.

  • Human-computer interaction: the research field framing the design of social music technologies.

  • Participatory design: approach where users actively help shape the design.

  • Co-design: collaborative design with stakeholders and users.
  • User-centered design: design informed by users, often as participants in research and evaluation.
  • First-class design partner: user with meaningful influence in the design process.

Important Concepts

  • Co-listening is defined as people intentionally listening to the same thing synchronously, whether or not they are co-located.
  • The study frames design around togetherness rather than simple social-network connectedness or explicit communication.
  • Participants commonly used texting, calls, social apps, games, and video chat to keep in touch, while music listening often occurred through FM radio, YouTube, Pandora, and mobile device speakers.
  • Participant designs revealed five dimensions for co-listening systems: how sessions begin, who can join, who controls playback, what hardware is assumed or invented, and whether music is added to social tools or sociality is added to music tools.

  • Access constraints shaped design concerns, including device ownership, parental rules, data use, Wi-Fi availability, and cost.

  • Co-design and participatory design treat users as active partners rather than only informants or test subjects.

  • Participatory design is historically linked to Scandinavian projects such as UTOPIA and emphasizes shared influence over future technology.
  • User involvement can range from little involvement, to user-centered design, to participatory design where users are first-class design partners.
  • In social music projects, participatory methods can reveal practices, identities, values, and social dynamics that would be missed by technical analysis alone.

Examples

  • Colisten let users browse Spotify playlists, add friends, see who was playing music, and join a friend's playback at the same track position and moment.
  • Some participants wanted friends to request permission before joining a listening session, while Colisten allowed a listener to simply join an accepted friend's active playback.
  • Participant designs included a phone taped to a radio, a boombox with multiple music sources and a display showing co-listeners, a tablet app where friends appeared as stations, and co-listening integrated with voice or video chat.
  • Participants cited practical use cases such as listening at home on Wi-Fi, on weekends, when not doing homework, or during carpooling.