Building the research study

Sifting through documentation, articles

• Vlachos, P., & Vrechopoulos, A. (2004). Emerging Customer Trends Towards Mobile Music Services. www.mad.gr (Accessed 2 November 2020)

  Currently, there are several ventures (e.g. musiwave, listen.com, etc) that try to exploit the inherent characteristics and benefits that the mobile networks and devices offer for delivering music content on-demand.

  While the demand for music products and services seems to be quite strong, on the other hand there is a slump (both in revenues and units) in the sales of the traditional vehicle for experiencing music - that is music CDs.

  In our research setting we define mobile music as the provision of an on demand personalized streaming music service over mobile devices that include music audio, music video clips and music related content (music news, artists’ biographies e.t.c.).

  As “music consumers” we define people that acquire, use/ experience and dispose music in any format (CDs, mp3s, records, cassettes etc) and on any medium (Radio, TV, hi-fi, live music events etc) [24].

  However, online surveys are considered to be a sampling technique suitable for exploratory research designs like the present one and quite ordinary in e-commerce research arena

• Bell, J, & Waters, S (2014), Doing Your Research Project : A Guide For First-Time Researchers, McGraw-Hill Education, Milton Keynes. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. (2 November 2020).

• Caine, K. (2016). Local Standards for Sample Size at CHI. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 981–992. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858498 (2 November 2020)

  Use methods that are appropriate to your approach and analysis strategy to determine sample size. For example, if you plan to perform statistical analyses, use a power analysis; for qualitative work use saturation.

  Note any constraints with respect to sample size. If cost or feasibility concerns played a part in sample size determination, note these [8; 17]. Explain how these limitations affect the interpretation of your findings.

  Finally, caution is required when using local standards. For example, using solely local standards in quantitative work is considered ineffective by statisticians [14; 15].

  At the beginning, when a researcher is choosing the size s/he wants their sample to be, determining how many participants to include is an important, yet sometimes tricky process. At the conclusion of the research process when a reviewer is evaluating the validity of claims made based on data presented, the reviewer must evaluate the sample size presented against conclusions drawn.

• Golsteijn, C., Van Den Hoven, E., Frohlich, D., & Sellen, A. (2012). Towards a more cherishable digital object. Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference, DIS ’12, 655–664. https://doi.org/10.1145/2317956.2318054 (Access 2 November 2020)

  Apart from utilitarian functions these objects also play a role in shaping and communicating our identities and social relationships, which has been illustrated by material culture studies [e.g. 4, 15, 25].

  Capturing, storing and using digital objects can thus be seen as an extension of collecting and using physical objects.

  Studies in social sciences and HCI have given insights in what objects we cherish and why [2, 11, 12, 17, 18, 20, 21] and the more recent ones have started to compare cherishing of physical and digital objects [11, 12, 20].

  Gonzáles further introduces the notion of ‘autotopography’ to indicate that the arrangement of physical objects with which we surround ourselves, such as clothing or furniture, has an autobiographical function, and says something about ourselves, our memories, histories and beliefs [9].

  Further, this study contributes to previous work by exploring further advantages and disadvantages of physical and digital, and by reflecting on if physicality or ‘digitality’ influences how special an object is perceived to be.

  Compared to individual interviews, focus groups add elements of interactivity between participants that can benefit sharing experiences in the sessions, which was deemed important for this study of cherished objects and the advantages and disadvantages of physical and digital.

  More cherishable digital objects can support meaningful use of digital objects, e.g. for reminiscence and storytelling, and can encourage engagement in active selection of meaningful media to keep and use, which is why we believe it is important for designers and developers to consider these issues in future design of products and systems.

• Csikszentmihalyi, M. & Rochberg-halton, E. (1981) The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (n.d.)
• Jung, H., et al. How Deep Is Your Love: Deep Narratives of Ensoulment and Heirloom Status.International Journal of Design 5, 1 (2011), 59-71.

• Kirk, D.S. and Sellen, A. On human remains: Values and practice in the home archiving of cherished objects.ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 17, 3 (2010), 1-43.

  In this article we seek to excavate the home archive, exploring those things that people chooseto keep rather than simply accumulate.

  In support of this we show how sentimentalartifacts are also used to connect with others, to define the self and the family, to fulfill obligations and, quite conversely to efforts of remembering, to safely forget.

  Additionally, as physical objects age they degrade, butthis fragility is often cherished, and the development of patina through useor neglect can add value to an object. Such affordances of the physical arenot normally applied to our digital artefacts (after all—digital is supposed tobe forever) but evidently such aspects of physicality might lead to intriguingredesigns of digital objects giving them new values.

  Making such an explicit connection between objects and their associations might be either disturbing or compelling.

  Another aspect of considering the important aspects of physicality is to con-sider how digital objects might take on some of the affordances of the physical world.

  This suggests that exploring waysof enabling new kinds of serendipitous display for digital objects, otherwiseburied deep in collections, would be compelling [Petrelli et al. 2009].

  More than just flickingthrough a repository of “memories,” we interact with our home archives in dis-tinct ways, showing different types of reminiscence and different motivations for archiving at all.

• Odom, W., et al. Understanding why we preserve some things and discard others in the context of interaction design. In Proc. CHI 2009, ACM Press (2009), 1053-1062.

  User interviews and survey data show thatusers’ behaviors change according to their goals, such as listeningto recommended tracks in the moment, or using recommendationsas a starting point for exploration.

  Designing music information access systems requires understand-ing the diverse needs of users and their expectations of systemperformance.

  In streaming platforms, users are provided with access tolarge repositories of audio content with only a small fraction famil-iar to them. This necessitates a new focus on one particular need:music discovery, which we define as the experience of finding andlistening to content that is previously unknown to the user.

  We havelimited knowledge about how users behave in a discovery contextand, moreover, how these behaviors change when systems fail tosatisfy user expectations.

  Which interactions with a recommendation system for musicdiscovery can be used to estimate user satisfaction?

  The interviews and surveys gave insight into theuser perspective on discovery and satisfaction,[...]

  User interviews revealed that users’ behaviors changed depending on their goals; survey data showed thatsatisfaction was correlated with achievement of goals.

  For example, we identified four usergoals that influence behavior: play new music in the background,listen to new music now and later, find new music for later, andengage with new music. We also learned that users expect discoveryto be hit-and-miss; just one loved track is enough for a user to feel satisfied.

• Odom, W., Zimmerman, J., and Forlizzi, J. Teenagers and their virtual possessions: design opportunities and issues. In Proc. CHI 2011, ACM Press (2011), 1491-1500.

  To date, little research exists about how people value and form attachments to virtual possessions.

  We characterize virtual possessions to include the many objects that are losing their lasting material form, such as books, music, photos, plane tickets, and money.

  Second, it details three opportunity areas around value construction with immaterial things: value in accrual of social metadata; value in placelessness and presence; and value in curation and presentation of self to multiple audiences; along with these design opportunities, we note several key concerns to help critically frame future work in this emerging area.

  There is also emerging HCI research describing how people develop sentimental attachments to digital artifacts.

  People actively reinvent themselves by selecting which elements of their past to keep and which to let go [21, p. 9]. While virtual possessions can play a potentially important role in supporting identity construction processes, how one might dispossess a virtual thing is unclear.

  Ultimately, we hope this study inspires future research into how technologies could be designed to engage people with their virtual possessions in more valuable and values-oriented ways.

• Petrelli, D. and Whittaker, S. Family memories in the home: contrasting physical and digital mementos.Personal Ubiquitous Computing 14, 2 (2010), 153-169.

  Physical mementos are highly valued, heterogeneous and support different types of recollection. Contrary to expectations, we found physical mementos are not purely representational, and can involve appropriating common objects and more idiosyncratic forms. In contrast, digital mementos were initially perceived as less valuable, although participants later reconsidered this.

  Evaluations show we need to better understand the environment where people live, and the meaning they attach to it, rather than simply realising new technological possibilities (Taylor et al. 2007).

  One common observation from this research is that people are generally dissatisfied with the organisation of their collections, feeling their personal information is disorganised and hard to access.

  We were interested in exploring the whole landscape of digital memories, so we asked about emails and music as well as more traditional memory objects like photos and videos. We askedwhere digital mementos were kept (PC, laptop, external hard drive, CDs, mobile phone, etc.), how and when they were accessed and used.

  Both results seem to support Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton’s (1981) finding of ‘an enormous flexibility with which people can attach meanings to objects... Almost anything can be made to represent a set of meanings’ [p87].

  As they began to discuss values and functions in relation to their digital collections, participants went from being initially dismissive of their digital collections to gradually discover they actually had digital mementos and how important those mementos were

  Although they were not recognized as such initially, on reflection people came to see their digital mementos as valuable and worth preserving. However digital belongings are perceived as problematic: being unstable and ephemeral compared with physical ones, and too impersonal to fully express the richness of memories

  In the home, different physical mementos are located in different places, affording different types of invocation.

  Another intriguing possibility is the prospect of making digital mementos more mobile, i.e. taking them outside the home. People now routinely use mp3s and iP od to carry their personal music with them wherever they are, allowing them to immerse themselves in their own sound world when they travel.

• Petrelli, D., Whittaker, S., and Brockmeier, J. AutoTopography: what can physical mementos tell us about digital memories? In Proc. CHI 2008, ACM Press (2008), 53-62.

• Mäntymäki, M., & Islam, A. K. M. N. (2015). Gratifications from using freemium music streaming services: Differences between basic and premium users.

  We employ uses and gratifications theory and examine four gratifications, namely ubiquity, social connectivity, discovering new music, and enjoyment, as the predictors of continuance intention. [...] The results demonstrate that enjoyment, discovering new music, and ubiquity, are the main drivers of the continuance intention. Interestingly, social connectivityhas no effect on continuance intention.Furthermore, premium users experience higher levels of enjoyment and ubiquitythan the non-payingbasic users.

• Belk, R. W. 1988. Possessions and the Extended Self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 2, 139-168.
• Wirfs-Brock, J., Mennicken, S., & Thom, J. (2020, April 21). Giving Voice to Silent Data: Designing with Personal Music Listening History. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376493

Roughly a quarter (22%–26%) of U.S. adults now own a voice-enabled smart speaker such as the Amazon Echo or Google Home [6, 11].

People typically access music via voice in a simple, transactional manner, such as requesting to play specific songs or to change the volume.

• Ng, J., & Yew, J. (2017). Why download when you can stream? The experience of collecting music in the streaming age. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, Part F129310, 28–33. https://doi.org/10.1145/3077343.3077346

  We found that despite access to streaming music content, our participants were still inclined to own media files. Our findings highlight that streaming is a poor substitute for the gratifications found in collecting music files. Despite this, streaming services are viewed as an indispensable way to sample music and facilitate the aggregation of one’s media collection.

  The proliferation of music streaming services highlights the music industry’s optimistic view of the streaming-access model as a replacement for the downloading-ownership model [14]. The streaming-access model is a form of music distribution that allows listeners to access music content without inherently owning the files [29]. Music, in this case, is sold as a service under subscription contract.

  However, the majority of the listeners have also indicated that they prefer to “own” music despite having access tostreaming services [4,7].

  Playlists were seen as a way in which some sense of “possession” could be retained when all the content is in the cloud. It was assumed that through the playlist, users could assemble, access, and share their music – much like they would for a music collection that they owned or possessed [5,27].

  However, increasingly the physical and digital boundaries are blurring with digital possessions being valued as much as material possession and beingmanifested into tangible form [11,22].

  This multi-stage study supports that streaming is not a substitute for downloading, even though it reduces one’s intention to download. The inadequate experience of collecting streamed content questions the value of collecting in the streaming age.

• Kleine, S., Baker, S. 2004. An Integrative Review of Material Possession Attachment. Academy of Marketing Science Review. 1-39.
• Miller, D. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption, New York: Blackwell.
• Brown, B. and Sellen, A. Sharing and Listening to Music. In K. O’Hara and B. Brown, eds., Consuming Music Together: Social and Collaborative Aspects of Music Consumption Technologies. Springer-Verlag, Berlin/Heidelberg, 2006, 37–56.
• Greengard, S. Digitally possessed. Communications of the ACM 55, 5 (2012), 14–16
• Odom, W., Zimmerman, J., and Forlizzi, J. Virtual Possessions. (2010), 368–371.