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By Jane Sun on August, 2017

The final concept was an interactive website built around a century of Queensland music held in the State Library's archive. Users could browse a curated collection of digitised scores, listen to them rendered in a music-box style, and control playback by dragging the cursor across the staff. Beyond passive listening, the design invited users to modify scores directly — repositioning notes and sharing their arrangements on social media — turning a historical archive into a living, participatory experience.

The primary audience was broad: from school students exploring Queensland music history to enthusiasts of music boxes and early 20th-century composition. The interactive layer was designed to lower the barrier to engagement without diminishing the cultural value of the underlying dataset.

Process: Concept development followed a structured Design Thinking process. Working within a small peer group, we clustered the available dataset by theme and brainstormed across those clusters. Alongside two alternative concepts — a greeting card generator for archival newspaper images and a Queensland Library info-map — I developed and evaluated each against novelty, technical feasibility, and audience fit. The Queensland Music Box concept offered the strongest combination of cultural depth and interactive potential, and was selected for further development.

Reflection: In retrospect, the ambition of the concept outpaced the initial scoping. The only machine-readable music data available were image scans of scores, which made automated transcription far more complex than anticipated. The concept pitch would have benefited from more detailed feasibility analysis and richer sketches to ground the proposal. These gaps were addressed systematically in Part A, where the design was refined with a clearer understanding of technical constraints.