Adrian Hazzard

Accountable Artefacts: The Case of the Carolan Guitar

We explore how physical artefacts can be connected to digital records of where they have been, who they have encountered and what has happened to them, and how this can enhance their meaning and utility. We describe how a travelling technology probe in the form of an augmented acoustic guitar engaged users in a design conversation as it visited homes, studios, gigs, workshops and lessons, and how this revealed the diversity and utility of its digital record. We describe how this record was captured and flexibly mapped to the physical guitar and proxy artefacts. We contribute a conceptual framework for accountable artefacts that articulates how multiple and complex mappings between physical artefacts and their digital records may be created, appropriated, shared and interrogated to deliver accounts of provenance and use as well as methodological reflections on technology probes.

Designing for Exploratory Play with a Hackable Digital Musical Instrument

This paper explores the design of digital musical instruments (DMIs) for exploratory play. Based on Gavers principles of ludic design, we examine the ways in which people come to terms with an unfamiliar musical interface. We describe two workshops with the D-Box, a DMI designed to be modified and hacked by the user. The operation of the D-Box is deliberately left ambiguous to encourage users to develop their own meanings and interaction techniques. During the workshops we observed emergent patterns of exploration which revealed a rich process of exploratory play. We discuss our observations in relation to previous literature on appropriation, ambiguity and ludic engagement, and we provide recommendations for the design of playful and exploratory interfaces.

Crafting Interactive Decoration

We explore the crafting of interactive decoration for everyday artefacts. This involves adorning them with decorative patterns that enhance their beauty while triggering digital interactions when scanned with cameras. These are realized using an existing augmented reality technique that embeds computer readable codes into the topological structures of hand-drawn patterns. We describe a research through design process that engaged artisans to craft a portfolio of interactive artefacts, including ceramic bowls, embroidered gift cards, fabric souvenirs, and an acoustic guitar. We annotate this portfolio with reflections on the crafting process, revealing how artisans addressed pattern, materials, form and function, and digital mappings throughout their craft process. Further reflection on our portfolio reveals how they bridged between human and system perceptions of visual patterns and engaged in a deep embedding of digital interactions into physical materials. Our findings demonstrate the potential for interactive decoration, distilling the craft knowledge involved in creating aesthetic and functional decoration, highlight the need for transparent computer vision technologies, and raise wider issues for HCI’s growing engagement with craft.

The Carolan guitar: a thing that tells its own life story

We live in a world where everyday objects, digital services, and human beings are increasingly interconnected. This forum aims to offer and promote a rich discussion on the challenges of designing for a broader ecology of materials, artifacts, and practices. --- Elisa Giaccardi, Editor

Audio Technology and Mobile Human Computer Interaction: From Space and Place, to Social Media, Music, Composition and Creation

Audio-based mobile technology is opening up a range of new interactive possibilities. This paper brings some of those possibilities to light by offering a range of perspectives based in this area. It is not only the technical systems that are developing, but novel approaches to the design and understanding of audio-based mobile systems are evolving to offer new perspectives on interaction and design and support such systems to be applied in areas, such as the humanities.

GeoTracks: Adaptive Music for Everyday Journeys

Listening to music on the move is an everyday activity for many people. This paper proposes geotracks and geolists, music tracks and playlists of existing music that are aligned and adapted to specific journeys. We describe how everyday walking journeys such as commutes to work and existing popular music tracks can each be analysed, decomposed and then brought together, using musical adaptations including skipping and repeating parts of tracks, dynamically remixing tracks and cross-fades. Using a naturalistic experiment we compared walking while listening to geotracks (dynamically adapted using GPS location information) to walking while listening to a fixed playlist. Overall, participants enjoyed the walk more when listening to the adaptive geotracks. However adapting the lengths of tracks appeared to detract from the experience of the music in some situations and for some participants, revealing trade-offs in achieving fine-grained alignment of music and walking journeys.

The Rough Mile: Testing a Framework of Immersive Practice

We present our case study on gifting digital music, The Rough Mile, as an example of a Framework of Immersive Practice, intended for researchers and practitioners in HCI and interaction design. Although immersion is a frequently used term in the HCI and related literatures, we find no definitions or frameworks that are robust enough to capture the full range of multi-sensory, emotional, and cognitive engagement that the richest of these experiences can entail. We therefore turn to the theatrical performance literature to distil a theory-based framework of practices that can apply to interdisciplinary projects as well as works with an entirely aesthetic aim. The design choices and findings of The Rough Mile are presented in terms of this framework, leading to a discussion of the design guidelines that can shape its use in any HCI or interaction design project aiming for a deep, personal engagement through technology.

Altering Speed Perception through the Subliminal Adaptation of Music within a Vehicle

We consider the potential for novel in-vehicle user-interfaces that alter speed perception at a subliminal level through the spatial adaption of music. In a fixed-base simulator, twenty-six participants drove on a motorway and were asked to maintain a speed of 70mph. At specific points, the speedometer was turned off. Music at a constant tempo was played throughout but periodically changed in balance from a 50:50 front:rear speaker split to a 25:75 ratio. Without the speedometer, participants drove significantly slower after the music had faded from the front to rear speakers (mean speed 71.5mph) compared to when no change occurred (mean speed 73.1mph). Post study interviews revealed that participants were not aware of alterations in the spatial positioning of the music. Such results suggest drivers naturally slowed when the music faded from front to rear speakers in an unconscious attempt to re-envelope themselves within the sound bubble.

Audio in place : media, mobility & HCI - creating meaning in space

Audio-based content, location and mobile technologies can offer a multitude of interactional possibilities when combined in innovative and creative ways. It is important not to underestimate impact of the interplay between location, place and sound. Even if intangible and ephemeral, sounds impact upon the way in which we experience the built as well as the natural world. As technology offer us the opportunity to augment and access the world, mobile technologies offer us the opportunity to interact while moving though the world. They are technologies that can mediate, provide and locate experience in the world. Vision, and to some extent the tactile senses have been dominant modalities discussed in experiential terms within HCI. This workshop suggests that there is a need to better understand how sound can be used for shaping and augmenting the experiential qualities of places through mobile computing.

The Rough Mile: Reframing Location Through Locative Audio

We chart the design and deployment of The Rough Mile: a multi-layered locative audio walk that blends pre-recorded spoken word, original music, and ambient environmental sound with real-time external ambient sound by employing bone conduction headphones. The design of the walking experience -- set in a city centre streets -- deliberately sought to explore novel mechanisms to create thematic and functional relationships between the layers of audio and attributes of the built environment, with the intention of constructing an augmented environment where the sounds of real and fictional are blurred. Twenty-six participants completed the walk describing an absorbing and well paced experience that encouraged them to view the location with an altered perspective, one that pulled aspects of the built environment and its population into the fictional story. We distil the findings and present a set of implications for the design of such locative walking experiences.