We can work it out : towards a participatory approach to designing music interactions

In domains such as music, the ability to effectively engage in a variety of activities is often dependent on knowledge of domain-specific theories, terminologies, concepts and processes learned in an academic context and made implicit through repeated practice. For activities of this nature, creating or enhancing software-based interaction designs to support novice users can be a challenging undertaking. One promising approach to this challenge involves decoding musicians’ implicit domain knowledge into structures known as conceptual metaphors, metaphorical extensions of recurring embodied experiences applied to abstract domains, and using this information to inform subsequent Music Interaction designs. In this paper we propose a participatory approach to Music Interaction design, intended to produce interaction designs for music software that are more "intuitive" in a precise sense, based on the principles of Conceptual Metaphor Theory.