Hello! I’m Quinn Verrill, a Junior studying Mechanical Engineering at Olin College of Engineering.

[personal statement - levels of design and engineering]

This website is a portfolio of some engineering/design projects I’ve done for courses or for passion, as well as some artwork I’ve made. Feel free to use tags to filter project pages, or just scroll around! 


Email me
Resume
Instagram
Linkedin
Contact Card
About Me
Back

The Soundscape

A community makerspace concept for Audio Engineers and musicians to collaborate and create



Project Overview

  • Course: Collaborative Design (ENGR2250)
  • Project Prompt: “Learn about the needs, wants, and values of Audio Engineers and co-create a solution”
  • Timeframe: 15 weeks, divided into 3 phases
  • Year: Spring 2025

When me and three other teammates were given the task of working with Audio Engineers for our Collaborative Design (CD) project, I was excited to learn the in’s and out’s of the music production world. I was also excited to practice user interviews and co-creating. 

The course itself is divided into three phases with a corrosponding Design Review after each. During these Design Reviews, teams are asked to articulate and defend user research findings and design decisions.


Phase 1 - Explore

During the first Phase of CD, teams set out to explore, gather information, and get to know everything they can about their people group. Teams do this by interviewing 8-12 members of their assigned people group, synthesizing information gathered into “people portraits”, and building useful frameworks to base future design work on. During these interviews, we were encouraged to dig deep into the motivations and values of the people we were talking to, as well as build meaningful connection.

By the end of Phase 1, my team managed to interview 10 Audio Engineers across a variety of fields and experience levels. We talked to people who ran sound for theater productions and live music, engineers who spent their time in the studio, and even people who picked up audio/video work for their churches or school clubs. A few things stuck out to us immediately:

  • Audio Engineering, no matter the form it takes, is a high stakes operation. A small mistake can make or break a production. As such, nearly everybody we talked to expressed a high degree of perfectionism contradicted by an acknowledgement that they couldn’t get everything right every time.
  • Audio Engineering is a field reliant on skills, but people we talked to all cited social intelligence as one of the most important tools in their toolbox. We saw this through people who got a start in the live music world through chance and connection, through engineers in the studio who felt that being able to read the room was essential for a successful recording session, and many more.
  • Almost universally, Audio Engineers feel that their role in a production is to be “out of sight, out of mind”. The rationale behind this, we found, was that if they do their job well, they are in the background.

We also found many differences between the Audio Engineers we talked to. These differences converged to become three “personas”, or a set of traits and motivations that form an archetype we can use to shape future designs.

[picture]
Caption: Photo of design artifacts from Phase 1, showcasing each persona arranged for a design review.



Phase 2 - Conceptualize

Armed with our design insights and personas from Phase 1, our team set out to ideate and co-design. In Phase 2, teams set out to establish conceptual directions to make meaningful contributions to people’s lives. To do this, teams identify Areas of Opportunity based on insights gained in Phase 1, ideate broadly, and co-design with members of their people group. Through frameworks identifying the boldness and impact of ideas, the ideation process is pushed comfortably out of the realm of realism. By the end, teams come out of Phase 2 with 8-10 promising ideas, represented in Gallery Sketch form, as well as a set of defined Design Directions.

By the end of Phase 2, my team established two Design Directions based on our ideation process, co-design sessions, and previous design insights/personas:

Increasing System ControlBy giving Audio Engineers more control over the variables of unpredictability and randomness in a production, we will 

Enabling Community


By designing to increas



In addition, we prepared XX gallery sketches of some promising ideas in each of our directions: 


Based on feedback from our Phase 2 Design Reveiw, we decided to move forward with 


BACK

Updated January 2026