Randomness as a resource for design

Abstract

Randomness is being harnessed in the design of some interactive systems. This is observed in random blogs, random web searching, and in particular Apple's iPod Shuffle. Yet the role of randomness in design of interactive systems in not well understood. This paper reports on an empirical study examining the influence of randomness on the user experience of music listening. 113 instances of selfreporting were collected and analysed according to four themes: listening mode, content organisation, activities during listening, and affective outcomes. The analysis provides insights into how randomness is used to engender certain affective responses (such as feeling refreshed) by using various constraining techniques (such as playlists) whilst engaging in everyday activities (such as driving a car). The paper argues that randomness can be used as an innovative design resource for supporting rich and novel user experiences.

Enacting archetypes in movies: grounding the unconscious mind in emotion-driven media

“…In the context of the cinema experience, the results of the selfreport data collected by introspective reasoning have indicated the inaccessibility of the conscious mind, but the results of physiological measures showed a relatively effective power to couple the archetypal content with emotional responses. This explanation is also partly in accordance with Damasio's proposition about the distinction between emotion and feeling (Damasio 2010). He argues that emotions are the phenomena that are carried out by cognitive actions in our bodies, which can be observed through physiological signals, whereas feelings of emotions are composite perceptions of these actions in body and mind.…”

Listen or interact? A Large-scale survey on music listening and management behaviours

“…Also relevant to playback methods is a 2006 study by Leong et al [19] that investigates the merits of shuffling. They report that out of 113 users, 91 chose shuffling over sequential playback as their favourite method of playback.…”

Experiencing coincidence during digital music listening

“…Since shuffle listening involves people delegating choice to the digital music player to randomly pick tracks from their music library, the listening experience is imbued with a sense of randomness [Leong et al 2006]. While the shuffle algorithm is not truly random (from a mathematical point of view, e.g., Chaitin [1975]), it is sufficiently unpredictable for listeners to perceive it as random.…”

“…Given that an iPod can potentially hold thousands of tracks, people's shuffle listening experiences can shift dramatically as they encounter very different kinds of music when moving from one track to another [Leong et al 2005;Levy 2006]. But whilst listeners can abdicate choice to the music player, listeners can also constrain the shuffle, that is, limiting the random selection to smaller subsets of their music library, such as particular user-defined playlists, genres, artists, and so on [Leong et al 2006]. This allows listeners to influence the degree of unpredictability during listening.…”