MELORI

MELORI-Music Product System

A design intervention to alleviate university students' time anxiety.
Cognitive Psychology · Media Ecology

Timeline:

Jan, 2023-Mar,2023

My Role:

Individual Project

Tools:

Arduino、Figma、Rhino、Cinema 4D

🎵Overview
We are living in an era of acceleration. Speed has made people more efficient, but has also introduced a sense of time anxiety and a shift in our conception of time and space. College students, in particular, face substantial pressure from excessive time demands and anxiety. This anxiety paradoxically reduces their learning efficiency and sense of well-being, turning them into servants of time. To address the issue of time anxiety among college students, I developed three main strategies and a product system.

📈Background
Problem context

With the increasing competition in society and the accelerating pace of life, "racing" has gradually become a symbolic cultural landscape of modern Eastern society. It brings about a sense of anxiety towards time among modern people, a feeling that is rapidly spreading across society. Queries like "Where has all the time gone?" and "There's not enough time" are becoming more prevalent in everyday conversations. The panic over the passage of time, the worry about not achieving set goals within a given timeframe, and complaints about the relentless busyness of life are diminishing modern people's happiness.

Professional evidence

📖Problem Modeling
Comprehensive modeling

Considering the involvement of psychology and communication studies in the time urgency issue, I combined perspectives from these disciplines to model its formation mechanism. Ultimately, I concluded that design can intervene time urgency in two ways:
· For the internal cognitive system: Design can assist students in alleviating attentional biases.
· For the perception of the external environment: Design can alter the "linear" metaphors in existing devices like clocks and creat new timekeeping tools with a "cyclical" metaphor.

Time urgency model from the cognitive perspective
After understanding how design can aid in addressing time anxiety, I needed to identify the core factors of this issue. Viewing time anxiety through a neural network model [1] , where time anxiety is the output and inputs vary widely, it became crucial to discern the key factors in the hidden layer. Thus, through literature research, I found Attention Control Theory to be most relevant [ 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ] . The cycle of [anxiety → imbalance in the attention system → biased attention towards difficulties → skewed resource allocation (reduced cognitive timer attention resources) → anxiety ] creates a systemic loop, with anxiety incrementally intensifying within this system. Then, I borrowed ideas from Cybernetics [7] to model a solution for this system.

📑Hypothetical Strategies
Strategic Framework

After analyzing relevant theoretical literature and existing solutions, I developed a preliminary strategic framework layer by layer.

Folk Remedies

I discovered that some users would use "time-slowing audio" to ease their sense of time urgency by researching their unconscious attempts to alleviate this issue. Therefore, the blocking strategy can be materialized into a music product.

📝User Research

Since the "Blocking" strategy targets External Distracting Stimuli (Threatening Information), and the "Regulation" and "Illusion" strategies target Internal Distracting Stimuli (Worrying Thoughts), understanding the stimuli encountered by users during the learning process is crucial to effectively implement these strategies in practice. Therefore, for external environmental stimuli, I employ observation methodology; for internal distracting stimuli, I use interview methodology.

🔍(1) Observation
After conducting a 3-hour observation in 3 different study rooms within Guangzhou University Town, I compiled the results of these observations.

📞(2) Interview
To ensure the scientific validity of the interview results, I randomly selected 10 university students from the study rooms and invited them to fill out a 7-item time urgency scale. Based on the final scores of the scale, 4 students were chosen for semi-structured interviews.

The research indicates that university students' worrying thoughts in study scenarios, stemming from internal distractions, are primarily caused by 3 factors.
· Personal factors: Mainly related to study habits and learning abilities. Study habits particularly refer to procrastination, while learning ability pertains to the difficulty level of content. Prolonged struggles with challenging tasks can lead to anxiety.
· Event factors: Mainly related to task completion. Anxiety arises if a task is nearing its deadline without being completed, or if completed but without results.
· Real-life factors：Mainly related to people and events. Interpersonal aspects mainly involve anxiety from comparisons with peers, while task-related factors pertain to unexpected events in life causing unease.

🚩Final Strategies

After conducting user research, I refined the design strategy and arrived at the product form.

📡Tech Research

After conducting user research, I refined the design strategy and arrived at the product form.

🎨Ideate & Prototype

💾Final Design

📋Reflection

This project is not my most comprehensive one, lacking steps like user testing, but it does reflect "who I am".

(1) Multi-Dimensional Thinking
Whether in academic or commercial problems, there is no single method or perspective for problem-solving. What I do is integrating different perspectives to provide the most suitable solution strategy for the given context.

(2) Media Ecology and Metaphor
Media Ecology helps me understand how a product's metaphor can alter human behavior. Then, I can modify the product's metaphor through design, thereby changing human behavior. Media Evolution, a derivative of Media Ecology, fundamentally views human needs as the environment for the natural selection of products. Human needs often have a constancy, the "media genes", with only the products carrying these needs evolving. For example, in the pre-technological world, humans would listen to nature's sounds or a grandmother's stories before sleep at night. In the modern era, this need has evolved into voice social and podcast apps.