12_Social Distancing_Mashup

Our Miro board to brainstorm possible ways to collaborate with others.
Scribbles for the app structure.
Scribble for the different types of content that people can contribute.
Scribble for the recording process.
Some Screens of the final app.

Inspiration

Suddenly thousands of people have to stay home (and really should!). Watching Netflix will get boring eventually, or at least it won't feel good to spend all day in front of the TV. How can you motivate people to stay at home for the coming weeks?

We are (almost) all into playing an instrument - and just last week we had actually planned to jam together. However because on of us actually got tested positive the jam didn't quite work out. We tried over Skype and WhatsApp but that didn't work at all. So we came across the hackathon by a mail from our university (we are all interaction design students) we thought to ourselves "lets change that", so we start to develop mashup.

What it does

Mashup enables creative minds to collaborate online together either by creating a song or a story:

Song This is a file, where the total length is fixed and gets determined by the author. When people want to contribute, they can do so by adding additional new layers to it. The more contributors, the more faceted the song will get. There are 4 Possible categories of layers:

Recordings of their pianos, guitars, drums, voice
Films (either live recorded or uploaded from the storage)
Drawings
Pictures

Story Contrary to a song, in a story the kind of layer that others can contribute through is fixed and gets determined by the author (for example: voice recording only). When people want to contribute, they can do so by attaching their sequence to the existing. The more contributors, the longer a story will get.

How we built it

We Interviewed some people to give feedback about the idea, we first had (create an online jam session - so instruments only), according to their feedback it was generally a cool idea, however especially the non-musical people felt it was too limiting, so we reiterated and came up with the final idea of mashup.
We split into groups and one group created the app and a prototype, as the other group thought of ways on how to produce a storyboard for our pitch video.
During Sunday Afternoon we all got active and recorded us playing piano, dancing, singing and playing the trumpet.

Challenges we ran into

Time definitely was and issue here ;) we've barely dug down deep enough to find challenges. If it would be for one challenge it was crucial but not easy to try to reduce complexity to a minimum. Especially the balancing of complexity vs. creative freedom was tricky.

Working all online was also very tiring (especially transferring all the files) and had definitely its limitations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In General we really like the idea that everybody can contribute online to a greater thing. And jam along with people hundreds of kilometers away (theoretically).