KanyeAR

We live in a time where we consume and process material entirely too quickly because of the amazing tools of access we’ve built for ourselves. This includes music as well. In a climate, especially in hip-hop, where an artist making a new album every month isn’t a rare occurrence, we’ve been conditioned to immediately look to what’s next.

If we don’t get “new heat” from an artists in a short enough window, we get start to slip into that “out of sight, out of mind” mindset. So how do try to challenge culture how look back and trigger a sense of nostalgia for more aged works? Additionally, how do we get people excited about doing so?

How can design an experience to empower music fans to re-discover Kanye West’s discography in a relevant and engaging manner?

Introducing KanyeAR — an app that allows users to transform any original Kanye West album cover into a mesmerizing augmented reality experience. By utilizing AR technology, KanyeAR provides a unique tool that can be trigger an animated rendering of any of Kanye’s albums simply by pointed your device’s camera at an image of any of his album covers.

This is product that’s been designed to empower users to WANT rediscover their sense of nostalgia. Furthermore, as you’ll see below, KanyeAR can used as the main tool for an even more impactful and immersive experience.

Understanding:

After conducting several rounds of secondary research to truly understand Kanye West, his fans, and music fans in general, I interviewed 20 people (mainly millennials as per my research). First I asked them, “Have you listened to an album that was released before 2010 in the last 6 months?”. Shockingly, only 20% had in fact done so.

Next, I asked a follow question — “Why don’t you listen to albums pre-dating 2010. What I found was that, it’s a similar reason many people don’t watch older movies — perceived quality. Music these days has hard hitting and more intricate production (aka more fire beats).

Furthermore, people felt that these albums were cool or culturally relevant. Gaining insight on these two questions during my research better helped me move forward in things what kind of experience I wanted to design.

I continued to lay out some principles to serve as guide of what my solution should encompass. In summation, it was important to make sure the experience was lightweight and brought a smile to the end user’s face.

I decided to incorporate the “How Might We” method into my ideation phase. I often find that by framing your problems as a direct questions, you can set your self up for innovative solutions. Here is a consolidated showing of my run through of the exercise:

How might we make all of Kanye’s albums seem cool and engaging?

I decided that that an Augmented Reality app would provide the best experience and bring a new level of excitement to Kanye’s music. Kanye has always put a lot of effort and care in his album art and they always are reflective of where Kanye is in his life at the time.

Kanye’s album art is more than just a cover, there artifacts tell you about their owner. KanyeAR is the tool that brushes off any dust from those artifacts and brings them into a new light.

I took this challenge a step further, and decided to build an entire experience ecosystem around Kanye AR with an album index book and activation event.

Sketch is a huge part of being able to put my processed ideas to a tangible forms. I begin thinking about form, scale, and animation for the Kanye AR experience.

I used Unity, Vuforia, Blender, and some C# to build out a basic form and animation for KanyeAR. AR and VR are unique because you have to keep in mind the environmental context of the users in relation to your experience. Nailing the animation was trial and error all the way through, but I finally landing on an engaging pattern that distract take from augmented album itself.

After I finalized the shape and form of my augmented album, I became to build out the experiences for all 11 Kanye Albums. I created a smooth and captivating animation that works on all print and digital.

The KanyeAR ecosystem is an extremely exciting way to celebrate Kanye West and his discography in numerous ways. I think’s a great way to rediscover nostalgic classics and be engulfed in an immersive experience life never seen before.

With the Kanye AR Discography Index, you can dive deep into every Kanye album he’s ever made and interact the whole way through. This be a merchandise like item at The Mind of Ye, an event where people can engage and interact with 11 rooms dedicated to each of Kanye’s albums — with KanyeAR and your lens.

I love to learn and by teaching myself how to build an Augmented Reality experience, I learned a lot about myself. I learned that I have a budding love for using new technologies to provide impactful experiences to people and put a smile on their face.

As with any experience, the product can always improve. I plan to flush out key aspects of this experience by building the web page to initiate the user journey for the experience. I always really want to dive deeper into what I can do with the animation of the albums themselves. I think movement plays a huge part is makes an AR experience great, but so does sound. I didn’t crack how to get different songs to play for each album, but I think that’d be a really fun exploration!

All in all, I learned a TON from this project and can’t wait to design more experiences like it.