Final Project Spring 2012


Design your own MP3 Player!

 

Presentations June 6th

Documentation due online June 8th

(project brief as pdf)

 

Although you have, at this point, built a basic MP3 player that actually plays MP3s, you can see that you are still a ways away from having a full-fledged working device. Issues such as use scenarios, conceptual models, mechanical skins or housings, and interface designs have yet to be worked out. Your ideas have yet to reach the “proof of concept” phase, where you show that what you envision can be built, much less the degree of validation that comes from “proof through use” where you can assess whether your designs actually function in the arena you intended. The goal of this final project is for you to have a fully functioning and well-designed MP3 player of your own design.

 

Your project is to design and build a MP3 player to suit a specific application of your choosing. To this end, you have been asked to articulate, through interaction diagrams, interface sketches, and written descriptions, exactly what it is you are proposing to build, and to enumerate what some of the design challenges that you foresee. You should plan on building multiple working iterations of your design to enable increasing levels of refinement towards your point of view, rather than hoping that all the different aspects of the design will miraculously come together just in time for the final presentations.

 

We will be having in class progress presentations on May 30th; please plan on presenting a functional prototype and a list of what remains to be done on that date.

 

Final presentations will be in the first floor lobby of Packard, from 4:15 pm to 5:30 pm, on June 6th. Do think ahead about what you might need (power cords, speakers, a backdrop to set the scenario of use, etc) to quickly convey the merits of your design to passersby!

 

We will be posting documentation of the projects on here pressplay.pbworks.com. You should set up your own page, and need, at a minimum, to post your design point of view (what are you designing a player for?), your Verplank diagram, photos of your paper prototype, your state diagram, your project code, and a video of the final working player in use.

 

Evaluation on this project will be based in equal measure on assessment of: