Jo Briggs

Socially engaged arts practice in HCI

Socially engaged methods are increasingly being used within HCI research, yet arts practice in this context has been little explored. HCI research that aligns with socially engaged arts practices encourages debate around societal challenges; for example discussion of issues surrounding the role of digital technology in sustainability, inclusion, community, identity and the politics of participation. Building on existing research, this workshop will bring together a diverse group of HCI researchers, artists and other creators whose work or interests align with socially engaged arts practice, to foster critical exploration and creative collaboration.

Making Sense of Blockchain Applications: A Typology for HCI

Blockchain is an emerging infrastructural technology that is proposed to fundamentally transform the ways in which people transact, trust, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. In this paper, we construct a typology of emerging blockchain applications, consider the domains in which they are applied, and identify distinguishing features of this new technology. We argue that there is a unique role for the HCI community in linking the design and application of blockchain technology towards lived experience and the articulation of human values. In particular, we note how the accounting of transactions, a trust in immutable code and algorithms, and the leveraging of distributed crowds and publics around vast interoperable databases all relate to longstanding issues of importance for the field. We conclude by highlighting core conceptual and methodological challenges for HCI researchers beginning to work with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.

Situated Encounters with Socially Engaged Art in Community-based Design

With the increased relevance of digital technologies in civil life comes the challenge of how to design research for citizen engagement. Drawing from three reflexive case studies presenting socially engaged arts (SEA) projects, we describe how, as artists, collaborators and researchers, we engaged in socially inclusive community-based projects. We argue that our roles required us to be both flexible and to adopt critical openness in practices of collaborative social facilitation. We conclude with insights to inform community-based research and enable nurturing and inclusive engagement in research design for the exploration of near-future digital technologies.

Social media resources for participative design research

We present our experiences of novel value from online social media for Participative Design (PD) research. We describe how particular social media (e.g. Facebook, Pinterest, WhatsApp and Twitter) were used during a five-year project on learning space design by the researcher and interested teachers across all research phases (contextual review, user studies, PD action research). Social media were used to source and share comments, photographs and video documentation, supporting participation in design research. Based on our experiences, we provide recommendations on informed worthwhile use of social media to enrich PD research by increasing diversity, recursivity and timely access to insights, informants, inspirations and influencers.

Investigating situated cultural practices through cross-sectoral digital collaborations: processes, policies, insights

The (Belfast) Good Friday Agreement represents a major milestone in Northern Irelands recent political history, with complex conditions allowing for formation of a ‘cross-community’ system of government enabling power sharing between parties representing Protestant/loyalist and Catholic/nationalist constituencies. This article examines the apparent flourishing of community-focused digital practices over the subsequent ‘post-conflict’ decade, galvanised by Northern Irish and EU policy initiatives armed with consolidating the peace process. Numerous digital heritage and storytelling projects have been catalysed within programmes aiming to foster social processes, community cohesion and cross-community exchange. The article outlines two projects—‘digital memory boxes’ and ‘interactive galleon’—developed during 2007–2008 within practice-led PhD enquiry conducted in collaboration with the Nerve Centre, a third-sector media education organisation. The article goes on to critically examine the processes involved in practically realising, and creatively and theoretically reconciling, community-engaged digital production in a particular socio-political context of academic-community collaboration.

From Evaluation to Crits and Conversation

Soon after the launch of the iPhone the British artist and printmaker David Hockney began sending his friends pictures he had made using painting and drawing apps. One of these friends was the writer and art critic Martin Gayford and in 2009 he received an iPhone drawing of a sunrise over the East Yorkshire town of Bridlington (Thames & Hudson 2007). The file on Hockney’s iPhone was identical to the one that he sent to Gayford which prompted him to ask—where was the original? Hockney sent many images to his friends and they in turn could share them until London was awash with “original Hockneys”. While Hockney’s limited edition etchings and lithographs attract high prices, this new method of production and dissemination challenged the notion of a limited edition “print run” because digital files can be reproduced with no diminution of quality at virtually no cost. These kinds of reflection led to a project called “Digital Originals” where we conducted several studies of practicing artists and developed an app called Repentir.