Coffee maker patterns and the design of energy feedback artefacts

Smart electricity meters and home displays are being installed in people’s homes with the assumption that households will make the necessary efforts to reduce their electricity consumption. However, present solutions do not sufficiently account for the social implications of design. There is a potential for greater savings if we can better understand how such designs affect behaviour. In this paper, we describe our design of an energy awareness artefact – the Energy AWARE Clock – and discuss it in relation to behavioural processes in the home. A user study is carried out to study the deployment of the prototype in real domestic contexts for three months. Results indicate that the Energy AWARE Clock played a significant role in drawing households’ attention to their electricity use. It became a natural part of the household and conceptions of electricity became naturalized into informants’ everyday language

3D pain drawings and seating pressure maps: Relationships and challenges

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 IEEEMobility impaired people constitute a significant portion of the adult population, which often experience back pain at some point during their lifetime. Such pain is usually characterized by severe implications reflected on both their personal lives, as well as on a country's health and economic systems. The traditional 2-D representations of the human body often used can be limited in their ability to efficiently visualize such pain for diagnosis purposes. Yet, patients have been shown to prefer such drawings. However, considering that pain is a feeling or emotion that is subjective in nature, the pain drawings could be consequently regarded as a subjective means of communicating such pain. As a result, the study described in this paper proposes an alternative, which encompasses a 3-D pain visualization solution, developed in a previous work of ours. This alternative is complemented with the upcoming technique of pressure mapping for more objectivity in the pain data collection. The results of this study have shown that the proposed approach is a promising solution for the purpose intended, and it could generally prove to be a significant complementary method in the area of medical practice for the mobility impaired community

Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences

Towards a framework for investigating tangible environments for learning

External representations have been shown to play a key role in mediating cognition. Tangible environments offer the opportunity for novel representational formats and combinations, potentially increasing representational power for supporting learning. However, we currently know little about the specific learning benefits of tangible environments, and have no established framework within which to analyse the ways that external representations work in tangible environments to support learning. Taking external representation as the central focus, this paper proposes a framework for investigating the effect of tangible technologies on interaction and cognition. Key artefact-action-representation relationships are identified, and classified to form a structure for investigating the differential cognitive effects of these features. An example scenario from our current research is presented to illustrate how the framework can be used as a method for investigating the effectiveness of differential designs for supporting science learning

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

Research students exhibition catalogue 2011

The catalogue demonstrates the scope and vibrancy of current inquiries and pays tribute to the creative capacity and investment of UCA research students. It brings together contributions from students who are at different stages in their research ad/venture. Their explorations are connected by the centrality of contemporary material practices as focal point for the reconsideration of societal values, cultural symbols and rituals and their meaning, and the trans/formation of individual, collective and national identities The media and formats employed range from cloth, jewellery and ceramics to analogue film, the human voice and the representation of dress and fashionin virtual environments. Thematic interests span from explorations at the interface of art and medical science to an investigation of the role of art in contested spaces, or the role of metonymy in ‘how the arts think’ And whilst the projects are motivated by personal curiosity and passion, their outcomes transcend the boundaries of individual practice and offer new insights, under-standing and applications for the benefit of wider society. Prof. Kerstin Me

Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems

As robotic systems are moved out of factory work cells into human-facing environments questions of choreography become central to their design, placement, and application. With a human viewer or counterpart present, a system will automatically be interpreted within context, style of movement, and form factor by human beings as animate elements of their environment. The interpretation by this human counterpart is critical to the success of the system's integration: knobs on the system need to make sense to a human counterpart; an artificial agent should have a way of notifying a human counterpart of a change in system state, possibly through motion profiles; and the motion of a human counterpart may have important contextual clues for task completion. Thus, professional choreographers, dance practitioners, and movement analysts are critical to research in robotics. They have design methods for movement that align with human audience perception, can identify simplified features of movement for human-robot interaction goals, and have detailed knowledge of the capacity of human movement. This article provides approaches employed by one research lab, specific impacts on technical and artistic projects within, and principles that may guide future such work. The background section reports on choreography, somatic perspectives, improvisation, the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System, and robotics. From this context methods including embodied exercises, writing prompts, and community building activities have been developed to facilitate interdisciplinary research. The results of this work is presented as an overview of a smattering of projects in areas like high-level motion planning, software development for rapid prototyping of movement, artistic output, and user studies that help understand how people interpret movement. Finally, guiding principles for other groups to adopt are posited.Comment: Under review at MDPI Arts Special Issue "The Machine as Artist (for the 21st Century)" http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/Machine_Artis