Design and semantics of form and movement : DeSForM 2007

A strong theme that has emerged in our previous two conferences in the importance of narrative to the process of generating, developing and communicating new modalities of interaction between people, things and environments. Our researches have identified aspects of importance in the design and have begun to establish orders of, priority of approach and representation for these aspects as components of interaction. We have begun to grapple with the growth in the complexity of the interaction design process for truly ‘animated’ functionality in products, especially where this manifests itself as apparent behavioural characteristics resident in or portrayed by products. The findings and experience of researchers is that this increase in complexity is likely to be exponential compared to the rigours relating to the resolution of static physical product configuration or even system operated product with screen based interfaces. The emerging sense is that narrative in the process is essential to bring meaning and to ‘touch’ our humanity or connect with human experience. ‘The science of the artificial in conversation with the poetics of human experience’! Through this conference we will once again engage in presentations, debate and demonstrations on these issues. In this respect we, the conference co-chairs, have sought to bring together researchers from academia, industry and professional design practice and related disciplines connected with interactive product service and system development to share our latest thinking in the field, to asses its outcomes and to identify further research questions, opportunities and territories for future investigation and exploration

Design and semantics of form and movement : DeSForM 2007

A strong theme that has emerged in our previous two conferences in the importance of narrative to the process of generating, developing and communicating new modalities of interaction between people, things and environments. Our researches have identified aspects of importance in the design and have begun to establish orders of, priority of approach and representation for these aspects as components of interaction. We have begun to grapple with the growth in the complexity of the interaction design process for truly ‘animated’ functionality in products, especially where this manifests itself as apparent behavioural characteristics resident in or portrayed by products. The findings and experience of researchers is that this increase in complexity is likely to be exponential compared to the rigours relating to the resolution of static physical product configuration or even system operated product with screen based interfaces. The emerging sense is that narrative in the process is essential to bring meaning and to ‘touch’ our humanity or connect with human experience. ‘The science of the artificial in conversation with the poetics of human experience’! Through this conference we will once again engage in presentations, debate and demonstrations on these issues. In this respect we, the conference co-chairs, have sought to bring together researchers from academia, industry and professional design practice and related disciplines connected with interactive product service and system development to share our latest thinking in the field, to asses its outcomes and to identify further research questions, opportunities and territories for future investigation and exploration

Form and Movement in Domestic Networked Systems

It is increasingly desirable for electronic artefacts in the home to be grouped as sets, sharing data and properties across a network. A range of strategies can be used by a designer to explore the value and use of the systems for users, in particular through the properties of form and dynamic behaviours, including visual output and movement. This paper focuses on a range recent work which exploits rich behaviour and novel forms to highlight opportunities for user engagement in the home

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL LOOK AT THE LIFE HACKING-ENABLED PRACTICES OF INDIVIDUALS WITH MOBILITY AND DEXTERITY IMPAIRMENTS

Human-computer interaction and assistive technology research and practice are replete with examples of mostly non-disabled individuals trying to empower individuals with disabilities through the design and provision of accessible products. This study asks one overarching question: what can these communities learn from the self-driven embodied experiences of individuals with disabilities who address accessibility, impairment, and everyday life concerns for themselves? The goal of this dissertation is to examine the underexplored adaptation, modification, and design-like activities of individuals with mobility and dexterity impairments as well as the implications of these activities for researchers, designers, and individuals with disabilities. This phenomenological study examined the embodied everyday life practices of 16 individuals with mobility and dexterity impairments as well as well as their efforts to transform disabling practices into enabling ones. Using sensitizing constructs from contemporary social practice theory approaches as described by Andreas Reckwitz and Theodore Schatzki as well Bruno Latour’s articulation of actor-network theory, this interpretive qualitative research study uncovers different ways participants were dis/enabled and dis/empowered in their daily life practices. Findings point to issues most HCI researchers and professional designers rarely consider in their efforts to study access issues and develop accessible technology, including the impact of the embodied perspectives of mostly non-disabled researchers and designers on the everyday life practices of individuals who live with impairments

Mediated rhythms of bodies in coordination: design of communication technology for connectedness

Due to social distancing restrictions caused by COVID-19, people worldwide have relied on communication technology for staying connected with their loved ones. Despite many benefits, these technologies are inadequate substitutes for the feeling of connectedness that is experienced during face-to-face interaction. In this thesis, informed by enactivism and embodiment theory, I argue that to design for connectedness we must stop reducing human communication to the information-transmission paradigm used in computer-mediated communication (CMC). While the notion of embodiment has been widely accepted by human-computer interaction (HCI) practitioners, the idea that human communication takes place through sending/receiving and encoding/decoding information has not yet been explicitly challenged. I have designed Undula, an experimental interface to explore the communicative potential of physical movement, in this case the movement afforded by a rocking chair (teaser available at https://vimeo.com/365451168). The interface consists of two large-scale custom-made rocking chairs. The rocking movement of each chair is sonified, allowing a pair of participants to communicate over distance via a co-created rhythmic soundscape. The interface was tested and evaluated in controlled environments over three stages in both immediate (same room) and distant (separate rooms) settings. This practice-based design exploration contributes to knowledge in several ways: - It focuses on the ethereal concept of mediated connectedness, which has not previously been explicitly defined within HCI research. - It proposes a conceptual shift from communication technology for information processing to communication technology for dynamic embodied expression. In doing it compares the conceptual understanding of these two schemes as situated respectively within the 2nd (interaction as information exchange) and 3rd (phenomenologically situated and embodied interactions) HCI paradigms. - It discusses design approaches for facilitating intersubjective dynamic interactions and affective engagements through movement coordination; these are not instructed or gamified but are implicitly facilitated through the interface design of a rocking chair device. - It updates previous studies by testing whether bidirectional coordinated movement can facilitate mutual feelings of connectedness between pairs of people over distance, without visual feedback or other external stimuli to aid synchronisation

Active Residues

My PhD studies the aftermath of the museum collection to show how the removal of the object leaves behind the multiplicity of its conditions. As an entry point, I probe a set of questions that arise from a sequence of events that happen in the autumn of 2018. It's a story that begins with an error: in six short hours in September, a disastrous fire brought an end to two centuries' worth of treasures held in Brazil's National Museum. Only a handful of artifacts of the 20 million items that were housed at the museum survived the fire. At the age of algorithmic reproduction, it feels almost unimaginable that so many valuable objects were simply wiped off the face of the earth without leaving any digital trace. I propose that although the museum's objects no longer operate within their inherited institutional orders or colonial indexes, some of their constitutions, temperaments, and affordances are "dragged" with them from their original matter to the digital and information realm. The residues are unordered strata of matter, bio-form, and digital information that remained unclaimed by the institution. The museum's residues do not have form, like objects. Instead, they are the surplus of affects, tools, and affordances that arrive with the objects. They enunciate the futurity of the museum apparatus in its state of afterness. Museum afterness applies to the incomplete state between the "no longer" and the "not yet". Afterness is the state that comes after an event or an institutional structure has ended but the orders and relations that conditioned its existence are still active. I argue that the state of afterness not only stands for what comes after the institution but can potentially represent knowledge based on continuity of transformation between technical systems, matter formations, and biological life forms. Active Residues is a practice-theory research project where I use theoretical frameworks and performance-based methods to speculate on several "modes of afterness," which is how I define a set of modalities and practices stirred up in the wake of the museum that can become active sites for unlearning it

Pretence and Counterfactual Reasoning: What is the nature of the relationship

This study aims to explore the theoretical assertion that pretence and counterfactual reasoning involve the same cognitive mechanisms. However, there is little empirical evidence concerning the nature of the association between pretence and counterfactual reasoning (CFR), and the associations of these constructs with other cognitive abilities. This study investigated shared cognitive skills proposed to link pretence to counterfactual reasoning and explored whether an underlying cognitive capacity might explain the associations shared between the two. This study uses a large-scale observational design to test the relationship between pretence and counterfactual reasoning at a structural level. 189 typically developing children (Mage = 58 mths, SD = 4) completed measures of pretend play, counterfactual reasoning, executive functions (EFs) and receptive language. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was used to assess whether pretence and CFR measures each loaded on to latent factors. Hierarchical multiple repression analyses were used to assess predictors of scores on these factors. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to explore whether a second order ability explained common variance in CFR and Pretence latent variables. CFA results confirmed the latent pretence and CFR constructs emerged as predicted. Further these factors were significantly correlated with each other. The hierarchical multiple regression analyses identified inhibition as commonly accounting for unique variance in both latent constructs. SEM supported that a second-order factor, predicted by inhibition, accounted for the unique variance shared between pretence and counterfactual reasoning. The findings are discussed with reference to the theoretical supposition that pretence and counterfactual reasoning share cognitive mechanisms. Based on the results of this first study to model empirically a unifying theory of pretence and counterfactual reasoning, a tentative new theoretical model is proposed which is based on the idea of a general mental state model of an imaginary representational capacity influenced by inhibitory control.Cambridge Lego Scholarshi