User driven innovation in smart displays: Lessons from the entertainment industry

This paper will review the evolution of user interfaces in the audio recording and music production industry, focusing on the major stages of development as seen by an observer who also tracked developments in other industries. This paper illustrates, through an historic examination of cases, how the development of user-driven requirements for a more responsive interface has often lagged the development of the technologies that enable functional performance in the industry. The fields of recording consoles and keyboard instruments have been selected as the focus for analysis because their separate and parallel developments illuminate the challenges facing improvement of interface design. This paper also shows how the awkward evolution of audio technologies has left the marketplace with incompatible interfaces and systems and continuing need for developments that integrate rather than perpetuate fragmentation.