Findings

Our design has induced changes in the socio-material circumstances of RGRA. The collaborative process of studying the evolving practices have explored potentials in the design by doing continous alterations. From the contexts of use, we learned a number of interesting things about how people interacted with and around the system.

Discovering

We saw that the system enabled people to easily make music that they found meaningful and intriguing. The design didn't require skills but nonetheless enhanced the skills the Hiphoppers had. Participants spent most of their time exploring what barcodes sounded like and were dominantly interested in trying out new items constantly. There seemed to be learning processes of random fiddling with the codes with limited musical interest, musical qualities leading most users to start exploring ("what if's"). Some obtained some control, but the design may only become an instrument in a session dedicated to composing, which could be the next event to explore.      

Roles

The practices we saw during the event showed how the settings, age, gender and roles as well interests  came into play. RGRA members enjoyed sharing  and cooperating in using the system, however only one female took part. At Inkonst the 10-14 year olds prevailed, absorbed in group dynamics while they were toying the scanner. At City Gross older RGRA members with musical interest took control and related to other people.

Materiality

We saw differences between being on the move and using a stand and decided not to explore a fixed wall mounted scanner. The design is also more than just a player as its materiality plays a role in several ways: The revelation of an item having a sound at all, the users associating musical qualities from their preferences of the products themselves,  and then the users looking at and moving the items in their hands as embodied codes for music composing. This could be said to feed from the paradox of the code: Barcodes may be the most material and obvious widespread digital code - to some degree a mass media- yet it is not comprehendable for the public.

Digitallity

In the beginning barcodes turned on and off when you scanned them, this was impractical for the context of RGRA and thus a life timer was added to barcodes. To still be able to keep barcodes alive, scanning them again would give them more life. This also created an exploratory function whereas you would not experience the full sound of a barcode unless you increased its life multiple times. At the Inkonst event we found that we had to limit the maximum amount of barcodes that could be active at one time since the kids scanned at tempo a lot higher than we had anticipated. This was later on removed at the city gross event, and instead a solo was added. This meant that each time a barcode was scanned, it had its own little solo for one or two seconds, this strengthened the tight coupling between the barcode and the sound created by it. Later on when added the DJ mode which again made barcodes turn on and off when scanned. DJ mode requires that you already know the system works, and preferably know some of the sounds of the available barcodes as well.