An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Reducing the effect of network delay on tightly-coupled interaction

Tightly-coupled interaction is shared work in which each person’s actions immediately and continuously influence the actions of others. Tightly-coupled interaction is a hallmark of expert behaviour in face-to-face activity, but becomes extremely difficult to accomplish in distributed groupware. The main cause of this difficulty is network delay – even amounts as small as 100ms – that disrupts people’s ability to synchronize their actions with another person. To reduce the effects of delay on tightly-coupled interaction, I introduce a new technique called Feedback-Feedthrough Synchronization (FFS). FFS causes visual feedback from an action to occur at approximately the same time for both the local and the remote person, preventing one person from getting ahead of the other in the coordinated interaction. I tested the effects of FFS on group performance in several delay conditions, and my study showed that FFS substantially improved users’ performance: accuracy was significantly improved at all levels of delay, and without noticeable increase in perceived effort or frustration. Techniques like FFS that support the requirements of tightly-coupled interaction provide new means for improving the usability of groupware that operates on real-world networks

The People Inside

Our collection begins with an example of computer vision that cuts through time and bureaucratic opacity to help us meet real people from the past. Buried in thousands of files in the National Archives of Australia is evidence of the exclusionary “White Australia” policies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were intended to limit and discourage immigration by non-Europeans. Tim Sherratt and Kate Bagnall decided to see what would happen if they used a form of face-detection software made ubiquitous by modern surveillance systems and applied it to a security system of a century ago. What we get is a new way to see the government documents, not as a source of statistics but, Sherratt and Bagnall argue, as powerful evidence of the people affected by racism

On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation

Imaging Beyond Representation is a provocative and bold rethinking of photography in light of the digital transformation and its impact on fine art, culture and society. Addressing the centrality of the digital image to our contemporary life, the fourteen new essays in this collection challenge the traditional categories of photographic theory - that of representation, evidence, documentation and the archive - and offer a fresh approach to its impact on aesthetics, contemporary philosophy and the political. Drawing on the networked human condition of embodiment, social-media, and bio-politics, On the Verge of Photography offers an invaluable resource for sutdents of visual culture, researchers in the field of digital imagining and artists working with new media. Reading this extraordinary book, it becomes clear that so much of what we knew or thought we knew about photography is at one and the same time accurate and obsolete. With digital photography the image can no longer be discussed or defined for what is it is conventionally assumed to be - a distinct visual unit. This is not a crisis, claim the editors of this timely volume, but an opportunity to step away from the representational terminology that has over-determined the discourse of photography in order to address the image's actual modes of being and becoming: being digitally-born, constantly transmitted, mutated and shared. When images are 'digitally networked' they cannot be isolated as viewed as distinct or unique. This book is a must read for anyone who shares with the authors collected in it an urge to acknowledge the contemporary image as a kind of living organism that intervenes int eh world we share not only by and through the ways we share them. -- Ariella Azoulay, Media/Comparative Literature and Modern Culture Brown Universit

Performing Building Sites : Curating in/on/through space

Performing Building Sites is the formulation of one of many possible critical strategies for curating. Performing Building Sites are approached as subject, site, and/or metaphor, proposing an understanding of architecture and construction as processual and hybrid fields of material and spatial practice. The project aims to explore methods for curatorial analysis and intervention on space, spanning from theoretical to practice oriented approaches. The Thesis is developed as both an academic research and as a curatorial project, extending the new research field of Curatorial Knowledge. The curator is proposed as a field practitioner, studying and intervening in existing spaces, and, sometimes, creating space. Central to this argument are theoretical and empirical knowings acquired through fieldwork. Situating the curator in space, producing research on spaces, suggests an implicated position for curating, and researching: in/on/through space. The academic research closely articulates with questions from a personal body of work developed by the author along a decade as an architect/researcher/curator. The images accompanying the study are (mostly) originals generated from fieldwork by the author and partners. Mostly set for curators, researchers and other spatial practitioners

Performative Wearables: Bodies, Fashion and Technology

This thesis argues that wearables are inextricably performative. By this I mean that performance—human and nonhuman performance such as those encountered both on and off stage, as well as social performance and the performance of fashion and technology—contribute to the creation and meaning of wearables. With this aim in view, the thesis explores performance from four research angles: a framing of the birth of wearables in a performative context; a theoretical analysis of wearables as somatically, aesthetically, and technologically constituted via the performative; a historical back-dating of pre-computational wearables stemming from Modernist performative fields; and the in-situ case studies of contemporary wearables creations. It is my goal to demonstrate that wearables are performative across transversal timelines, materials, styles, fabrication processes, and body expressions. Using references from the art-research labs currently involved in developing fashion-tech and wearables—as an important counterbalance to industry’s contributions to wearables—I ask this central question: how can concepts of performance elucidate wearables? I look toward performance as a key thread that follows wearables’ beginnings to the current, contemporary technological culture embedded in media arts and experimental contributions to the field. Why? Because wearables are more than the sum of the technologies they incorporate, they are the result of their admixtures of fashion, bodies, display, and transformation (in both human and technological form). In short, wearables are active, (a)live, and hence both the objects themselves and the individuals wearing them participate in the co-creation of their performance. Performance is complex—striding as it does across disciplines from the technological and engineering; to the human and unscripted—and for this reason it is richly suited to the challenges encountered when describing wearables. Performance is the key pathway, in my opinion, through which we can gain stronger insight into the stakes, meanings, messiness, desires, and technological innovations that are being developed in wearables in artistic labs past, present and future

Sociomaterial design of coordination in knowledge sharing : a heritage KMS reference architecture

Designing knowledge management systems (KMS) from sociomaterial (SM) tenets has the potential to improve coordination in knowledge sharing activities. However, current information systems knowledge lacks enough guidance on how to go about sociomaterial design. In this Design Science Research (DSR) study we present a set of sociomaterial design guidelines for KMS that enable knowledge sharing (KS) in the historical and cultural heritage domain. We carried out three DSR iterations to define design requirements, formulate sociomaterial design guidelines, and instantiate and evaluate these through a prototypical instantiation of a KMS. This research contributes to the IS literature by presenting an actionable set of guidelines for applying SM principles in designing new KMS. The capability of this design approach has been demonstrated through a KMS validation in an international and interorganizational KS network. We demonstrate how technology designers can use sociomateriality as a design lens enabling them to further create IT-based coordination mechanisms and we show the value of considering SM design to advance in overcoming coordination issues for sharing knowledge.Doctor en IngenieríaDoctorad