Toyota Woven City
A speculative AR app from in-depth ethnography research on urban design for Toyota Woven City
Timeline
4 months (Feb โ May 2025)
Role
Solo Product Designer
Outcome
Detail research report, hi-fi prototypes delivered to the Woven City team at Toyota
Overview
What is Toyota Woven City?
Toyota Woven City is a project by Toyota that aims to create a mobility-friendly community. There first testing community is in Mt. Fuji, Japan. I joined the project as a co-creator to contribute to the large research on technology for urban pedestrians.
why pedestrians with auditory sensitivity?
A silent struggle
To live in a big city like New York is to live in an invisible yet visible soundscape. While noise sensitivity is a public health issue, it is not often discussed.
initial problem discovery
solution highlights
ethnography research
Getting to know my audience in real life
Approaching this large problem, I wanted to find a specific angle and common issues that pedestrians with auditory sensitivity.
Hereโs the portrait of typical New Yorkers that helped guide my design direction:
An emerging theme from the insights:
How might I help pedestrians with auditory sensitivity feel less
anxious and distract by helping them anticipate the sounds?
Maximizing focus by abstracting workflows
In the quest of challenging the traditional DAW interface pattern to replace with a more intuitive, I separated production apart from post-production. This created the challenge of connecting them together while keeping complex functionalities intact. The final 3 modes proved to be more intuitive for seeing this connection.
4 screens for 4 modes, too complex
1 screen for 3 modes, simple
Communication channel
Placing communication in the top right corner instead of left proved to be more discoverable to users through testing. Additionally, improvements in labels (โJamโ to โTeamsโ) and visual nature of the components (fixed vs. floating) added to discovery and utility success rate.
fixed comms bar and vague language
flexible position and intuitive language
Toolbar
From testing, I refined the information displayed in the toolbar for each mode: recording and mixing, so that only necessary functions remain.
Version 1 โ unnecessary information
Record
Effects
Plugins
Sync Current Version
Record
GRoup
ABC
Lyrics
Select
Version 2 โ Double recording function
Recording
GRoup
ABC
Lyrics
Play
ChannelS
Plugins
Effects
Play
Final Version โ essential information
Style guide
An indie and nostalgic music technological world
I take inspirations from the feeling of the "zone" โ how we can get lost in the process of making music. This is why I gravitated towards the indie, ethereal vibe building โ to reminds users that Bounce are for bouncing human ideas. Additionally, I took the name "Bounce" from the common DAW button label when exporting the final product, and the act of "bouncing" ideas off of each other.
Drum rollsโฆthe final designs!
Elaborated MVP for music collaboration
3 different views allowing focusing on different tasks with flexible panels
Real-time chat, call and video call while working on production
Recording and composing a new song
Quickly put down a musical idea with teammates to canvas with no time restrictions
Drag idea to Master Tracks area to synchronize and review the overall song structure
Mixing a song post-production
Add effects and plugins as nodes for troubleshooting semantic audio issues
Version Control
Upload local changes to the shared cloud for mutual access to the latest version of the production
results
โa guitarist/producer after testing out Bounce
Retrospective
Designing a tool for creators requires thinking in meta
It was such a fresh air to take on a challenge of creating something that others use to create with. I learned to consider the stakeholder's stakeholders โ how producers would consider their audiences' needs when they produce, and what would they need to get those results. These insights have driven my designs in wonderfully surprising ways!
Abstraction is key to convey complex functionalities
This project has humbled me and pushed me to prioritize the most efficient flows to best illustrate my product. Many details such as building the audio library or bypassing custom plugins needed to be abstracted in order to communicate my core ideas, especially to non-target users.
A solo project, but I was not alone
I am lucky to have received supports and feedback from both of my designer and musician communities in this projects. Co-creating a DAW with actual producers has opened my eyes in how I'd approach design โ more daring, more innovative, and more human. It has been a rewarding sprint, and I am deeply grateful for every help along the way ๐