Danielle M. Lottridge

Love, hate, arousal and engagement: exploring audience responses to performing arts

Understanding audience responses to art and performance is a challenge. New sensors are promising for measurement of implicit and explicit audience engagement. However, the meaning of biometric data, and its relationship to engagement, is unclear. We conceptually explore the audience engagement domain to uncover opportunities and challenges in the assessment and interpretation of audience engagement data. We developed a display that linked performance videos with audience biometric data and presented it to 7 performing arts experts, to explore the measurement, interpretation and application of biometric data. Experts were intrigued by the response data and reflective in interpreting it. We deepened our inquiry with an empirical study with 49 participants who watched a video of a dance performance. We related temporal galvanic skin response (GSR) data to two self-report scales, which provided insights on interpreting this measure. Our findings, which include strong correlations, support the interpretation of GSR as a valid representation of audience engagement.

The choreographer's notebook: a video annotation system for dancers and choreographers

We present a collaborative tool for choreographers and dancers, the Choreographers Notebook, which allows multimodal annotation of rehearsal videos during the dance production process. The dance production process is a creative process in which exploration and expression are paramount and we describe issues we have observed over four different dance production cycles. The Choreographers Notebook addresses the recurring problem of scarcity of rehearsal time and space, which is a limiting factor for exploration and expression. The tool is a web-based video application that enables choreographers to provide multimodal, context-sensitive instructions and feedback to the dancers outside of formal rehearsal time. The novelty of this tool is its ability to provide a multimodal collaborative video-based workflow. This article also presents a thorough ethnographic investigation of the dance production process and results from the use of the Choreographers Notebook as an artifact within that process.

Affective Interaction Understanding, Evaluating, and Designing for Human Emotion

This chapter reviews relevant research on emotion, focusing on aspects of emotion that are most relevant to human factors design. The review begins with a discussion of basic emotion concepts, such...

Evaluating longitudinal projects combining technology with temporal arts

The integration of interactive technology with temporal art such as dance is an exciting, emerging area. The design space for such collaborations is immense, with variations in sensors, visualizations, and how these interact with dancers and choreography. This paper presents the evaluation methodology and results of Dance.Draw, a longitudinal project spanning two years and three productions, which aimed to develop a deep, interdisciplinary understanding of this space. Given that this is pioneering work, there is little guidance on how to evaluate such collaborations. We describe the significant confounds in doing evaluation in this area, and we present our evolving mixed-methods approach, which includes two unique methods to address the multiple stakeholders in a holistic manner: dancer focus groups and repeated presentations. Our approach has generated insights, such as differing perspectives of audience members and the responses of dancers to technological variables. We conclude by discussing the challenges and successes of our evaluation approach.

Bodies in critique: a technological intervention in the dance production process

The dance production process is strongly influenced within the physical rehearsal space by social context factors and dynamics, such as intimacy of bodies, gender distribution, and the hierarchy of choreographers and dancers. Introducing online tools for asynchronous collaboration can change the traditional dance production process and impact the social dynamics of the group. We developed and deployed the Choreographers Notebook, a web-based, collaborative, multi-modal annotation tool used in the creative process of making dance. We collected usage logs and choreographer reflections on the use of this tool, along with conducting interviews and focus groups, from the interdisciplinary perspectives of both technologists and choreographers involved in the project. We describe the socio-technical impacts of the Choreographers Notebook based on the results of its usage in three dance productions. We analyze these case studies through various contextual lenses and provide a visualization of how the choreographic correction process evolved.

Identifying Emotion through Implicit and Explicit Measures: Cultural Differences, Cognitive Load, and Immersion

Measures of emotion should accurately characterize the nature of an emotional experience and determine whether that experience is universal or unique to a subgroup or culture. We investigated the value of assessing emotion through skin conductance (an easy-to-interpret physiological measure) and sliders (frequently used and direct measures of perceived emotion). This paper describes findings from two experiments. The first evaluated various slider configurations and found that measured emotions successfully characterized the emotional nature of short videos. The second experiment collected the slider and skin conductance measures of emotion while one sample of Japanese participants and another sample of Canadian participants viewed longer videos. The measures were sensitive enough to identify cultural differences consistent with existing literature and were also able to identify parts of the experience where members from different cultures reacted consistently, pinpointing content that provoked a universal experience. We offer a toolkit of data interpretation techniques to gain more insight into the implicit and explicit emotion data: analyses for expressiveness and agreement that can infer states such as engagement and fatigue. We summarize the aspects of our measurement approach and toolkit in a model: the ability to distinguish the emotional nature of stimuli, individuals, and affective interaction.

Third-wave livestreaming: teens' long form selfie

Mobile livestreaming is now well into its third wave. From early systems such as Bambuser and Qik, to more popular apps Meerkat and Periscope, to todays integrated social streaming features in Facebook and Instagram, both technology and usage have changed dramatically. In this latest phase of livestreaming, cameras turn inward to focus on the streamer, instead of outwards on the surroundings. Teens are increasingly using these platforms to entertain friends, meet new people, and connect with others on shared interests. We studied teens livestreaming behaviors and motivations on these new platforms through a survey completed by 2,247 American livestreamers and interviews with 20 teens, highlighting changing practices, teens differences from the broader population, and implications for designing new livestreaming services.

The Effects of Chronic Multitasking on Analytical Writing

Chronic multitaskers perform worse on core multitasking skills: memory management, cognitive filtering and task switching, likely due to their inability to filter irrelevant stimuli [17]. Our experiment examines effects of chronic multitasking with task-relevant and irrelevant distractors on analytical writing quality. We found a general switch cost and, when controlling for that cost, effects of chronic multitasking habits: heavy multitaskers write worse essays in the irrelevant condition and better essays in the relevant condition. Our study changes multitasking research paradigms in two fundamental ways: it studied a realistic writing scenario including access to both irrelevant and relevant distractors. We found that the effect of chronic multitasking is complex; heavy multitaskers are seduced by unrelated distractors but able to integrate multiple sources of relevant information.

Embracing First-Person Perspectives in Soma-Based Design

A set of prominent designers embarked on a research journey to explore aesthetics in movement-based design. Here we unpack one of the design sensitivities unique to our practice: a strong first per ...

Browser Design Impacts Multitasking

With smartphones, tablets and laptops, it has become easier than ever to multitask constantly. How does the design of devices and applications encourage or discourage multitasking behavior? Given the ease and seamlessness of switching between goal-oriented tasks and distractions in a browser, and the propensity to lose track of time, our design team focused on increasing awareness of switching between browser tabs, and on increasing awareness of how time is spent within tabs. We designed a browser plug-in that automatically categorized URLs as work or non-work, altered tab color, size and placement, and added a status bar that displayed the total amount of time spent on a tab and overall in work/non-work mode. We conducted a two-week field study to evaluate the effects on browsing behavior. We found that modifying the browser design influenced multitasking: participants spent less time on non-work tabs, switched between tabs less frequently and spent more time on work-related websites.