Robyn Taylor

Designing from within: humanaquarium

We present an experience-based approach to designing a collaborative interactive performance, humanaquarium. Our research explores public interaction with digital technology through the practice-based inquiry of an inter-disciplinary team of interaction designers and musicians. We present a method of designing experience from within, literally situating ourselves within the performance/use space and assuming the roles both of performers and of designers as we develop and refine the humanaquarium project over the course of a years worth of public performances.

Intml: A dataflow oriented development system for virtual reality applications

This paper presents our research on the Interaction Techniques Markup Language (InTml). Our final goal in this work is to find ways to evolve and fit virtual reality (VR) applications over heterogeneous hardware platforms, a process we call retargeting. Toward this goal, we have developed a hardware-independent, component-based, formal model that describes the execution of VR applications; an XML language for describing complex and implementation-independent VR applications; a methodology for InTml-based development; a manual way to isolate and replace interaction techniques as a contribution to VR retargeting; and a set of tools for development support. This paper describes these topics and states future directions of our research.

Exploring HCI's relationship with liveness

Liveness has long been a valued quality of mass media presentation in areas such as music, sports and debate. The rapid development of new digital media, and the interpenetration of these media and staged performance, places liveness center stage in attempts to understand emerging human-computer configurations. This workshop will bring together insights from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to explore how HCI can benefit from critical engagement with theoretical and practical treatment of liveness. To seed discussion and action, participants will engage reflectively with the liveness of an authentic performance, experienced firsthand and at one-remove through a mediating technology, using an innovative video-based methodology.

Exploring participatory performance to inform the design of collaborative public interfaces

We describe a new application of interactive participatory performance in interaction design. Our pragmatic strategy permits us to use performance as an investigatory tool in the exploration of user behavior. By taking a holistic view of the evaluation of the interplay between the designed artifact (the performance content) and the people who interact and relate to it, we can extract insights from the performance with the intention of informing the process of designing interaction mechanisms for more conventional public interfaces.

Nightingallery: theatrical framing and orchestration in participatory performance

The Nightingallery project encouraged participants to converse, sing, and perform with a musically responsive animatronic bird, playfully interacting with the character while members of the public could look on and observe. We used Nightingallery to frame an HCI investigation into how people would engage with one another when confronted with unfamiliar technologies in conspicuously public, social spaces. Structuring performances as improvisational street theatre, we styled our method of exhibiting the bird character. We cast ourselves in supporting roles as carnival barkers and minders of the bird, presenting him as if he were a fantastical creature in a fairground sideshow display, allowing him the agency to shape and maintain dialogues with participants, and positioning him as the focal character upon which the encounter was centred. We explored how the anthropomorphic nature of the bird itself, along with the cultural connotations associated with the carnival/sideshow tradition helped signpost and entice participants through the trajectory of their encounters with the exhibit. Situating ourselves as secondary characters within the narrative defining the performance/use context, our methods of mediation, observation, and evaluation were integrated into the performance frame. In this paper, we explore recent HCI theories in mixed reality performance to reflect upon how genre-based cultural connotations can be used to frame trajectories of experience, and how manipulation of roles and agency in participatory performance can facilitate HCI investigation of social encounters with playful technologies.

dream.Medusa: A Participatory Performance

We describe a system which allows several audience members to participate in a performance of an interactive media piece. The performance is created using Max/MSP and Jitter, and is controlled by live voice as well as by participant-operated manipulated objects. The performance was created as part of an interactive art exhibit exploring a night of dreaming and was devised in order to explore the experience of lucid dreaming. We discuss our experiences with the performance and the potential use of participatory performance as a vehicle for exploring wider issues in interaction design.

Designing from within: exploring experience through interactive performance

This thesis describes a practice-based methodology in which an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists and musicians create, enact, and iteratively refine a series of technologically mediated participatory performances structured to investigate HCI research questions surrounding participant engagement with technological interfaces in public settings. We choose to “design from within” by taking active roles as performers in each piece, experiencing the performance alongside participants within an authentic public use context. We draw upon McCarthy and Wright’s pragmatic approach towards experience-centered design and evaluation, using their theoretical framework to interrogate the sensual, emotional, spatio-temporal and compositional aspects of collaborative behaviour through felt, lived experience. This self-situated manner of practice allows us to experience the enactment of our design interventions firsthand, and develop understanding of the performance scenario through our own personal processes of sense-making. Our participatory installations are intended for public consumption, meaning the works must always maintain production quality suitable for professional exhibition. However, they are intentionally implemented so that they may be constantly refined and re-configured, changing and developing as our understanding of and relationship to them grows over time. In this thesis, we describe the creation, performance, and evaluation of three interactive works: dream.Medusa (2007), humanaquarium (2009) and Nightingallery (2011). We explain how our experiences with the performances revealed insight into engagement with technologically mediated interaction in public spaces, allowing us to investigate how modifying performance design affected experiential issues such as the reduction of stage fright, the encouragement of collaboration, and the exploration of the relationship between legibility and expressivity. The novelty of our approach lies in how we have taken an active role as performer/designers within the use context of a series of performances, each subsequent performance being inspired by the research undertaken throughout the investigative trajectory. We draw upon personal, autobiographical experiences with the projects to develop understanding of public engagement with creative technologies, allowing our experiences with the projects to inspire avenues of HCI design intervention and research. Our method of investigation leverages interdisciplinary practice and expertise to inform interaction design for playful, ludic systems in a holistic, pragmatic, experience-centered way.

HCI: human-computer improvisation

This workshop explores the forms of improvisation that exist across various disciplines, how they can be observed empirically, how improvisation relates to technology and design, and how communities of improvisation exist and evolve. Through the use of these topics to stimulate discussion, along with group activities founded in theatre and music improvisation, we investigate how the study of improvisation can be used to inform contemporary HCI.

Crafting interactive systems: learning from digital art practice

To create digital art, skillsets from a variety of disciplines are combined to form a finished aesthetic product. An artist may engage in hybrid practice, building his/her own technologies, or may collaborate with specialized technicians to form a creative team. This workshop will bring together participants from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, including art, music, design, and engineering to explore how the technological aspects of digital art function not merely in service to artistic considerations but rather, have creative and communicative value in their own right. We will discuss how explicit valuation of technical process in interdisciplinary design affects the experience of digital art creation, and explore how technology itself is and can be aestheticized in digital art practice. We will use these concepts to frame an investigation of how engagement with digital art practice can be used to enrich HCI.

Deep surrender : Musically controlled responsive video

In this paper we describe our responsive video performance, Deep Surrender, created using Cycling ’74’s Max/MSP and Jitter packages. Video parameters are manipulated in real-time, using chroma-keying and colour balance modification techniques to visualize the keyboard playing and vocal timbre of a live performer. We present the musical feature extraction process used to create a control system for the production, describe the mapping between audio and visual parameters, and discuss the artistic motivations behind the piece.