Candis (Sage) Tagiso
The Shell Club is a community run group which hosts events that allow people to engage with media outside of hostile tech ecosystems. Their main events is a Media Swap where people can bring their CDs, DVDs and more and exchange them for other media. The Shell club was born out of a frustration with how we as consumers are forced to engage with art. Large tech companies have captured these markets and taken advantage of artists to feed their bottom line so The Shell Club seeks to offer an alternative way of engaging with music (and media as a whole).
The Shell Club hosts a multitude of events such as Media Swaps, Listening Parties and Mixdates. You can sign up as a member for the club and get special perks including discounts, member exclusive events and a quarterly run down letter.
The idea for the Shell Club arose through a dissatisfaction with the corporate consolidation of media specifically surrounding music. I created my thesis based on this idea through criticising Spotify and its cultural impact. I wanted to make something in response to my frustrations. The issues with the tech landscape are so varied and complicated that I think people often feel powerless in the face of how large and ubiquitous these tech companies are. One of the Shell Club's main aims was to offer a reprieve from that and allow people to engage with art in a way that was engaging and fulfilling.
I wanted the interaction with the Shell club to be mostly tactile. My outcomes focused on the experience and the things users would have direct contact with such as the tokens for the media swap or the club's manifesto. Other outcomes included:
- Promotion for the club
- Media Swap event with posters and signage
- Manifesto Booklet and Media Swap leaflet
- Club microsite
- Smaller printed matter such as the membership cards, punchcards, prompt sheets etc.
I decided to write an extended thesis as the breadth of my research was vast and I wanted to challenge myself to deeply explore my ideas in a longer format.
The thesis explored the recent phenomenon of people moving away from streaming music to collecting physical media. This came after more than a decade of Spotify supremacy of which I critically explored through a sociological, cultural and design lens.
The rising sentiment against Spotify in the last few years came in response to a culture in which art (in this context music) is devalued into content for the benefit of large platforms. I examined different time periods of music listening, Spotify and streaming, and the communities that have grown from the dissatisfaction with the current model of media consumption. I made a case for the superiority of physical media as opposed to streaming which has warped to become a highly unethical form of music distribution.
Hey! I'm Candis but my friends call me Sage. I'm a multidisciplinary designer and researcher based in Ireland. I strive to create conceptual narrative-driven designs that burst off the page (or screen) with creativity and intent. I have experience in UX research after completing my internship at Workhuman and I use the skills I gained there to delve deep into any project I'm given. I have a particular interest in creative direction, illustration, research and branding across print, web and motion. I believe in the potential of design to impact the world in positive ways and I hope to be apart of those solutions through my work.
