The Glass Engine
Like most people with an interest in Interaction design and its peripheral fields, I’ve been consuming Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge with gusto. One of the featured projects is The Glass Engine, designed by Mark Podlaseck, a researcher at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. A project to provide a meaningful way of sampling and browsing the works of Philip Glass, its a wonderful illustration of how empowering interaction design can be when done right. Each of Philip Glass’s tracks is tagged with some standard metadata (Work title, year released, track length, track title) and then five “mood” attributes as defined by the composer’s producer - Joy, Sorrow, Intensity, Density, and Velocity. By providing 9 simple sliders for each of these attributes, you can browse by all of these properties. As you modify the current slider, each of the other sliders rearranges accordingly, affording you great freedom to explore the large collection of music. This is a design that I’m sure would work extremely well on your iTunes library (if you could be bothered to tag those thousands of songs with mood attributes that is). Anyway, have a play - its the only way you can really appreciate it.
See the the interview with Mark Podlaseck here. View the Glass engine here. I had some problems running in Firefox - you might want to try IE (ugh).
