TurnApp55 - The Social Music App

Paper in proceeding, 2016

There has been an increased interest regarding how to make people stop enclosing themselves with their own digital devices. One of the suggested solutions is to use the phones themselves as the tool to break the bubble. In this report we explore one such option in the app TurnApp55, and outline its design and development. TurnApp55 is an app that relies on people’s interest in sharing music they like with others nearby. The users add songs from their Spotify Premium accounts onto a collaborative playlist, where subsequently other users can add their songs and listen to the ones already submitted. Each user can then endorse songs they like, an action which notifies the submitter, leading to them being able to communicate outside the app and hence bursting the mobile bubble. The app was created through several iterations, from paper prototypes, via an interactive prototype, to a finalized Android app.