Juxtaposing mobile webcasting and ambient video for home décor

In order to invent and investigate new approaches for the use of enjoying live video, we suggest a combination of emerging mobile webcasting with artistic ambient video, which would enable a form of user generated broadcasts from individually selected cherished places for home decoration. Drawing on the approach of Research through Design we present a study of people who have occasional access to highly appreciated geographical locations, a design instantiation and prototype called LiveNature, as well as a system implementation. We present the result of a technical evaluation, which was conducted during two weeks of deployment. It shows that mobile webcasting provide continuous and stable streams of such a quality that it can be presented for home decoration, and that the video can be combined with real time sensor data to generate aesthetically interesting hybrid media. We also learned that the use of mobile webcasting for home decoration raises new challenges in order to provide unobtrusive and glance based interaction

Space, sociomateriality, sound. The learning spaces of higher education

This thesis is concerned with the relationship between digital technology and the learning spaces of higher education. Across an academic year I observed and documented the learning spaces and practices that were emergent within undergraduate courses in American History and Architectural Design at a UK university. Drawing on field recordings, photographs and conversations with students and staff, and supported by theoretical work in sociomateriality, digital technologies were shown to be deeply implicated in the negotiation of learning spaces across and beyond the campus. I make three central arguments within this thesis. First, the presence and positioning of digital technologies within the classroom enacts particular epistemologies and power dynamics, although this manifests differently across courses of study. Second, the flow of data, combined with the proliferation of networked technologies, reconfigure the boundaries of the campus, as a single setting comes to accommodate a range of spatial identities. Third, digital technologies are complicit in the neoliberalisation and commodification of learning spaces, and the educational practices that are performed in those settings. In order to make these arguments I have looked to the critical and methodological value of sound, often in conjunction with images and other data. Sonic methods and materials have been largely overlooked within education research and yet, as I demonstrate, the digital reproduction of sound helps academic staff to enact authority over a classroom, and supports students as they seek to establish and configure personalised learning spaces. In giving due attention to the role of the audible within my research, this thesis is presented in richly multimodal form where argumentation is advanced through a juxtaposition of written commentary, photography and field recordings. This thesis make an original contribution to scholarship in digital education, sound studies and social science methodology. Further value is to be found in the potential to inform the thinking and practice of designers, teachers, educational technologists and institutional managers as they conceptualise and construct spaces for learning