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RE: Re: [microsound] Artists who also work for software companies



At 11:00 AM +0200 7/1/03, jarguel@xxxxxx wrote:

>In what way, as musicians, you interact/modify with products?
>What is the diference for a company in having an ingeneer or a musician
>to do the same kind of job? What is the interest?

Musicians are likely to have a better sense of how real customers 
will work with a company's products. In my experience an engineer may 
be satisfied if a product performs its functions without crashing. A 
musician will be more concerned about how well these functions are 
performed. That is, a musician will care about the ergonomics of a 
user interface, in how simply and elegantly common tasks can be 
performed. An engineer might think, "If you need to do task 'Z' all 
you have to do is first pull down the menu 'M' and select function 
'N'. Then  choose option 'O' and set parameter 'P' to value 'Q'. 
After that, open window 'R' and enable features 'S', 'T', and 'U'. 
Click "OK". When the dialog box appears, asking if you're sure you 
want to do this, click "Yes."  A musician might prefer to have 
multiple presets to store various choices for all the parameters O 
through U and then to call these up with simple keystrokes so that 
you have one operation instead of nine.

>manufacturing? marketing?

It isn't clear what you are asking, but I'll make a guess.

Manufacturing is less amenable to a decentralized system, since you 
are working in hardware rather than software. You can't have a group 
of telecommuters performing assembly line tasks. Still, most 
manufacturing these days is performed by contracting out parts of the 
job, such as circuit board fabrication.

Marketing can be done collaboratively with a combination of in-house 
and contract workers, Since a great deal of marketing is essentially 
"software" such as art design and copy writing. Task can be performed 
by individuals using e-mail, ftp, telephone, etc. Naturally there 
will also be face-to-face activities such as in-store demos, trade 
shows, and site visits to important customers.

If your question is instead, how a musician is a valuable contributor 
in these areas, I'd say that in manufacturing it is less active. 
Presumably once a product is on the assembly line it has already been 
reviewed in prototype by a variety of people including artists who 
will provide valuable feedback on how "nice" the hardware is to work 
with. As to marketing, a musician will provide insights into how 
other musicians might react to the marketing materials and 
strategies. One specific area  is in creation of technical manuals, 
where the language can often be shaped to appeal to musicians, 
providing the technical information in a creative context with case 
studies, "tips and tricks" and so on.
-- 

______________________________________________________________
Richard Zvonar, PhD
(818) 788-2202
http://www.zvonar.com
http://RZCybernetics.com

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