Johan Niemi

Hello. If you're hiring and if the position involves interaction design and product development, I may just be the best qualified tricolor horse in the state of Denmark (said to be a rotten state).

As a horse I love other horses. But I would be lying if I said I loved horses more than music and interactions. I am in fact exceedingly interested in music recommendations and designing obvious interactions. This obsession coupled with the insufficiencies of today’s music services like Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify, we7 and Slacker, recently inspired me to write my concluding project at Digital Design (Aarhus University):

Activity-based music recommendation - how online music services can exploit listener activity.

(Email me for a one-page abstract.)

How come we have to create sleep playlists, manually filtering out upbeat music, adding music with gentle vocal harmonies and quiet guitars playing simple chord progressions? Why do the services not know what we want to listen to when we sleep? Why don’t they know what we want to work out to? What we want to listen to in the bus? To do so music services need to identify what makes music suitable for different scenarios. I looked at a couple of them seeking to find out how music can play a performance-enhancing role in sports and how mobile listeners often use music in an entirely different way; as a companion to keep away from boredom and loneliness. These findings were then translated into specific suggestions on how online music services can better recommend music by taking user-activity into account.

For now I'm also a happy Qbrick streamer, streaming all kinds of funky video and audio on a variety of platforms.

Check my qualifications by clicking the linked in icon below.