Kristina Andersen

Anti-Solutionist Strategies: Seriously Silly Design Fiction

Much of the academic and commercial work which seeks to innovate around technology has been dismissed as solutionist because it solves problems that dont exist or ignores the complexity of personal, political and environmental issues. This paper traces the solutionism critique to its origins in city planning and highlights the original concern with imaging and representation in the design process. It is increasingly cheap and easy to create compelling and seductive images of concept designs, which sell solutions and presume problems. We consider a range of strategies, which explicitly reject the search for solutions. These include design fiction and critical design but also less well-known techniques, which aim for unuseless, questionable and silly designs. We present two examples of magic machine workshops where participants are encouraged to reject realistic premises for possible technological interventions and create absurd propositions from lo-fi materials. We argue that such practices may help researchers resist the impulse towards solutionism and suggest that attention to representation during the ideation process is a key strategy for this.

'Ensemble': playing with sensors and sound

This paper presents a set of sensor driven sonic prototypes and the workshops in which they are played with by children in games of dressing up. Seven garments are fitted with wireless sensors that control sound samples and their modifiers in real time. The aim of the project is to capture the childrens emerging understanding of the sensors as they explore and play and in the longer term inform the use of analog sensing in touchable interfaces. The system is described and observations from the first workshops are reported. The paper concludes with a short discussion and conclusions regarding both the system itself and the methods used.

Playing games in the emotional space

The nature of user studies is changing, reflecting changing visions of both what is relevant to study and how to study it in order to understand the user. The focus has progressively moved from the task to the activity including an analysis of not only people’s actions but the social, cultural, and economic factors that influence their behaviour. Now, with the so-called ubiquitous technologies moving out of the office and pervading people’s personal sphere, designers must examine different facets of the user; in order for a product to be good (and successful), it should be both satisfying and pleasurable in the private life of the individuals.

Circles and props: making unknown technology

The OWL Circles are hosted in a neutral, utilitarian space containing a large, shared worktable with a selection of tools and various neatly organized recycled materials.

GiantSteps: Semi-Structured Conversations with Musicians

This paper describes an initial interview session involving users in the imagination and exploration of working creatively with electronic music. The underlying concern for this process is to not just improve existing user interfaces, but rather to aim for interface structures developed in direct peer collaborations with expert users, with an aim to provide increased flow and unbroken periods of concentration and creativity. This work-in-progress paper describes the theoretical concerns informing the process and the results from the first round of interviews.

The deliberate cargo cult

Taking its origin from the notion of the cargo cult as an elaborate misunderstanding, this paper suggests a series of exploratory design methods to support users in generating requirements and scenarios-of-use for technological objects that do not yet exist. Strategies from fields such as art and performance are used to create experiences of user-involvement centered on the making of non-functional mock-ups. These can then act as props through which the participant can express their intuitions and concerns with a given technological notion. The processes described makes use of a broad range of cultural drivers to engage users in playful misunderstandings that facilitate new, out of the ordinary, interpretations of objects. The paper outlines the basis of three projects, discuss the drivers behind each project and suggests guidelines for creating these kinds of exploratory embodied experiences.

The instrument as the source of new in new music

How can we treat technological matter as yet another material from which our notions of possible future instruments can be constructed, intrinsically intertwined with, and informed by a practice of performance? We strive to develop musical-performance instruments not only by creating technology, but also in developing them as aesthetic and cultural objects. A musical instrument is not an interface and should not be designed as such; instead, new instruments are the source of new in new music. Like any traditional instrument, a new instruments potential for producing quality musical sound can only be revealed when it is played. We present an instrument-design process conducted by a visionary and an agenda-setting musician. The resulting objects are experimental prototypes of technological matter, which allow analysis and meaning to be specified through physical and tactile interaction with the objects themselves. As the instruments evolve through various stages, their capability is continually enhanced, making them all the more desirable for musicians to play.

Attending to Objects as Outcomes of Design Research

The goal for this workshop is to provide a venue at CHI for research through design practitioners to materially share their work with each other. Conversation will largely be centered upon a discussion of objects produced through a research through design process. Bringing together researchers as well as their physical work is a means of gaining insight into the practices and outcomes of research through design. If research through design is to continue to develop as a research practice for generating knowledge within HCI, this requires developing ways of attending to its made, material outcomes. The premise of this workshop is simple: We need additional spaces for interacting with and reflecting upon material design outcomes at CHI. The goal of this workshop is to experiment with such a space, and to initially do so without a strong theoretical or conceptual framing.

The hands: The making of a digital musical instrument

Michel Waisviszs The Hands is one of the most famous and long-lasting research projects in the literature of digital music instruments. Consisting of a pair of data gloves and exhibited for the first time in 1984, The Hands is a pioneering work in digital devices for performing live music. It is a work that engaged Waisvisz for almost a quarter of a century and, in turn, has inspired many generations of music technologists and performers of live music. Despite being often cited in the relevant literature, however, the documentation concerning the sensor architecture, design, mapping strategies, and development of these data gloves is sparse. In this article, we aim to fill this gap by offering a detailed history behind the development of The Hands. The information contained in this article was retrieved and collated by searching the STEIM archive, interviewing close collaborators of Waisvisz, and browsing through the paper documentation found in his personal folders and office.

The Dial: Exploring Computational Strangeness

This paper describes the process of a computational idea emerging from a process of user engagement: algorithmic recommendations as artistic obstructions in creative work. Through a collaboration between HCI and Music Information Retrieval, we conducted open-ended interviews with professional makers of Electronic Dance Music. We describe how the idea emerged from this process, and consider how algorithmic recommendation systems could be re-considered as tools for artistic inspiration. We propose the concept of a Strangeness Dial, which allows the gradual adjustment of the degree of desired otherness, which is tested through the use of a non-functional prop and a series of interviews.