Tom Flint

Enactive appropriation

The appropriation of digital artefacts involves their use, which has changed, evolved or developed beyond their original design. Thus, to understand appropriation, we must understand use. We define use as the active, purposive exploitation of the affordances offered by the technology and from this perspective; appropriation emerges as a natural consequence of this enactive use. Enaction tells us that perception is an active process. It is something we do, and not something that happens to us. From this reading, use then becomes the active exploitation of the affordances offered us by the artefact, system or service. In turn, we define appropriation as the engagement with these actively disclosed affordances—disclosed as a consequence of, not just, seeing but of seeingas. We present a small case study that highlights instances of perception as an actively engaged skill. We conclude that appropriation is a simple consequence of enactive perception.

Virtualizing the real: a virtual reality contemporary sculpture park for children

ABSTRACT This paper discusses a virtual reality experience for a contemporary sculpture park, Jupiter Artland, developed in Minecraft targeting 9–11-year-old children. Issues of fidelity, realism and authenticity are considered, examining the use of Minecraft to create visual representations loosely coupled with reality that generate affective responses. We discuss the build of our virtual sculpture park outlining our approach to creating a facsimile of the sculpture park through adopting practices from the Minecraft community and refining and improving the artworks and experience informed by a class of 9–10 year old children. Using the real and virtual sculpture parks we explore the impact of engaging with the real before the virtual Jupiter Artland and vice versa, with the results from a three class study outlined in this paper.

Playlab: telling stories with technology (workshop summary)

This one-day workshop explores how playful interaction can be used to develop technologies for public spaces and create temporal experiences.

The Ensoulment of Virtual Space Minecraft as a Tool for Engaging With a Sculpture Park

This is a demonstration of a Minecraft facsimile of Jupiter Artland, a sculpture park on the outskirts of Edinburgh. With the cooperation of primary school children we developed a mixed reality game employing Minecraft. Our aim is to investigate attachment to virtual space and the use of make-believe to manage this.

Fiction for Design: Appropriating Hollywood Techniques for Design Fictions

There is evidence that narratives told in a structured manner are more likely to be convincing to an audience. Design Fictions are an increasingly popular medium in HCI. It is important that we make our stories believable so that they can be more readily accepted. Looking beyond the laboratory, this chapter discusses and presents story telling techniques that have been adopted in professional story telling environments such as film making. Rather than a prescriptive set of instructions this chapter offers concepts for consideration when creating fictions.