TMAP Design Cards for Technology-Mediated Audience Participation in Live Music

Historically, audiences have had various ways to participate in live music performances, including clapping, dancing, swaying, whistling, and singing. More recently, mobile and wireless devices, such as smartphones have opened up powerful new opportunities for audience participation. However, design for technology-mediated audience participation (TMAP) can be challenging: musicians and audiences have different demands, as does the coherence of the music, and group needs can vary widely. Thus, effective TMAP design requires the balancing of knowledge from diverse perspectives and must take into account the needs of diverse roles in creating and supporting performances. This chapter focuses on the process of creating and evaluating a set of design cards to support the interaction design and evaluation of TMAP systems. The cards are based on a previously created descriptive framework for supporting interaction design and evaluation in this challenging area. We discuss the conception and development of the TMAP design cards in some detail, and present an empirical study to evaluate their practical usefulness. Particular attention is paid to the ability of the cards to support finding ideas, changing ideas, and examining ideas from different perspectives

Understanding Music Interaction, and Why It Matters

This is the introductory chapter of a book dedicated to new research in, and emerging new understandings of, music and human-computer interaction—known for short as music interaction. Music interaction research plays a key role in innovative approaches to diverse musical activities, including performance, composition, education, analysis, production and collaborative music making. Music interaction is pivotal in new research directions in a range of activities, including audience participation, interaction between music and dancers, tools for algorithmic music, music video games, audio games, turntablism and live coding. More generally, music provides a powerful source of challenges and new ideas for human-computer interaction (HCI). This introductory chapter reviews the relationship between music and human-computer interaction and outlines research themes and issues that emerge from the collected work of researchers and practitioners in this book

Community-Building in Later Life and the Role of Information and Communication Technologies

The thesis explores the capabilities of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in community-building in the context of a rural retirement community, and considers the notion that ICTs can transform the patterns of social participation in later life. Drawing on the symbolic interactionist perspective and using ethnographic and narrative approaches, I look into the ‘material’ and ‘virtual’ aspects of community participation of older people, and the assumption that ICTs have the potential to enhance civic engagement in later life. A special emphasis is placed on how ideas about the contribution of ICTs to community-building meet the community practices in a particular location, and what these practices are. The project is informed by the following research questions: ‘What is the role of ICTs in defining and maintaining community for people in later life?’ and ‘How does engagement with ICTs in later life shape the construction of collective identities?’ The use of ethnographic and narrative methods enabled the production of data that, along with depicting individual experiences, also highlighted the context where collective identities are produced and sustained, and where meanings are created. I explore long-standing and relatively recent community structures and practices, as well as the development of new ones, with a particular focus on those facilitated by or emerging through the use of ICTs. I consider the utility of ICTs for enhancing community participation in one single location, and discuss how ICTs are geographically embedded and developed by community members and groups. Of specific interest are the relationships between the processes of community-building and the construction of collective identity, including its spatial and demographic aspects. Particular attention is paid to the significance of locality as part of creating meanings about the community, and the role of community practices in construction of shared identity with a focus on those enabled by ICTs. Symbolic interactionism provides the framework for exploring how older people’s understanding of community translates into the creation of actual physical and virtual spaces. This thesis contributes to the body of knowledge about old age and technology by looking at the use of ICTs by older people from a micro-perspective. It brings a unique level of understanding of how older people engage with ICTs in the context of communitybuilding, which was made possible by employing ethnographic and narrative methods and the extended immersion of the researcher in the setting. My research is a step towards identifying and understanding whether ICTs can enable greater civic participation in later life, and if being ‘digitally included’ can improve the quality of life and the community engagement for older people

InEx: A Show About Inclusive Design

What does the term “inclusive design” mean to you? Broadly speaking, the colloquial definition of “inclusive design” is the intersection between “something that looks inclusive” and “something that looks like it was designed.” This stands in contrast to the more holistic approach which makes up the Inclusive Design program at OCAD University, whose program is focused from the start on seeking out and empowering marginalized, minoritized and historically underinvested communities through all phases of product design. The effect of this more superficial interpretation above taking hold is in shaping public perception. Embracing that superficiality by aligning the term to often fundamentally wrong-headed “design for” projects acts not only to further marginalize the purported users of these products, but to devalue the work of people trained in equity design, participatory action research and co-design, among other techniques and methodologies. Attention (and resources) flow to simple feel-good stories, at the expense of the more complex reality of inclusion and equity work in design roles: that they take time and effort, and don’t fit neatly in PR-friendly boxes. To address this gap in understanding, as well as the range of constituencies involved in defining, or at least narrowing down, the term “inclusive design,” I conducted a series of interviews with six professionals in fields exploring inclusion and equity in design. The resulting conversations showed an expansive set of lived experiences, personal insights into academia and industry, critique into the theory of its inclusive design and how it is claimed, and a look at where we go from here

InEx: A Show About Inclusive Design

What does the term “inclusive design” mean to you? Broadly speaking, the colloquial definition of “inclusive design” is the intersection between “something that looks inclusive” and “something that looks like it was designed.” This stands in contrast to the more holistic approach which makes up the Inclusive Design program at OCAD University, whose program is focused from the start on seeking out and empowering marginalized, minoritized and historically underinvested communities through all phases of product design. The effect of this more superficial interpretation above taking hold is in shaping public perception. Embracing that superficiality by aligning the term to often fundamentally wrong-headed “design for” projects acts not only to further marginalize the purported users of these products, but to devalue the work of people trained in equity design, participatory action research and co-design, among other techniques and methodologies. Attention (and resources) flow to simple feel-good stories, at the expense of the more complex reality of inclusion and equity work in design roles: that they take time and effort, and don’t fit neatly in PR-friendly boxes. To address this gap in understanding, as well as the range of constituencies involved in defining, or at least narrowing down, the term “inclusive design,” I conducted a series of interviews with six professionals in fields exploring inclusion and equity in design. The resulting conversations showed an expansive set of lived experiences, personal insights into academia and industry, critique into the theory of its inclusive design and how it is claimed, and a look at where we go from here

Internet Mediated NGO Activity: How Environmental NGOs use Weibo in China

This thesis uses an interdisciplinary approach that draws on both the political science and media and communication fields to analyse how Chinese environmental NGOs use the microblogging site, Sina Weibo, in their online activism. The study of NGOs and how they use the internet in China is widespread. However, in many cases, the way that NGOs in China work, both online and offline, has been analysed through the lens of traditional civil society and internet studies literature, which has mostly focused on the ability of NGOs, and the internet, to give rise to significant political change, and even democratisation.Through a mixture of thematic, network, and organisational analysis, this thesis investigates the communicative functions, themes, and use of interactive features in posts on Weibo, including the use of hashtags, retweets and @mentions. At the organisational level, the ways that NGOs engage with different actors, both online and offline, including fellow NGOs, government departments, their followers, and potential donors are interrogated using four case studies. These analyses found that although the political space afforded to environmental NGOs in China is severely constrained, and the operations of the NGOs could not be seen as overtly activist or confrontational in the traditional sense, the NGOs do in fact retain a certain amount of autonomy and are able to carve out some political space for themselves. The findings of this thesis therefore challenge the notion that NGOs in China are co-opted organisations without autonomy from the state and suggests that there is scope for digital activism by NGOs in an authoritarian context, even though the online and offline political space they inhabit may be tightly regulated and controlled

The design of technology-mediated audience participation in live music

Zusammenfassung in deutscher SpracheTechnology-mediated audience participation (TMAP) offers a wide variety of ways to enhance the involvement of spectators during the performance of live music. Technological change has created rich new opportunities in this area. However, interactions of this kind can be hard to design effectively. Musicians and audiences have distinctive requirements, as does musical coherence, and there can be wide variation among both groups. Thus, the effective design of TMAP generally requires balancing knowledge from diverse perspectives and the taking into account requirements of very different roles in live music performance. Research in this distinctive area of interaction design, and the provision of guidance for designers is at present highly limited. Hence, this thesis identifies and analyses issues in the design of technology-mediated audience participation (TMAP) from a variety of perspectives and synthesises a framework for supporting the design and evaluation of TMAP. This framework describes the design space of TMAP in a practice-oriented way to support design-related processes around TMAP in live music. Methodologically, the overall strategy is based on a research through design approach, using a mixture of mostly qualitative methods in two main research strands: field exploration and framework construction. The first strand, the field exploration, starts with two user studies. These are interviews and a survey to study requirements of musicians and spectators and to identify potential design strategies for case studies. Two subsequent case studies focus on live concerts as in-situ studies and explored two contrasting approaches to realising TMAP in practice. In the first case study, smartphones were used to let the audience control the guitar sound collaboratively. This case study was guided by a participatory design approach involving both spectators and the performing musicians during development. The second case study focused on the composition of a song crafted with TMAP in mind, and its live performance. During performance, a big balloon in the audience allowed spectators to control piano sound effects. The field exploration enabled the identification and analysis of issues affecting the design of TMAP in live music. These contributed to framing challenges and potential design strategies for the second strand where the TMAP Framework was developed. The TMAP Framework was synthesised using both the experience of the field exploration and a systematic review of related work to identify design characteristics. The framework was then iteratively evaluated and refined through a series of studies testing its use for analysis and design tasks. To support this, two different presentations of the framework were developed. TMAP Online is a web-based tool used for classification exercises within a class of students to describe a range of existing examples for TMAP using the framework. TMAP Design Cards (a set of 46 cards) are a tangible instantiation of the TMAP Framework, used in groups to reflect on design sessions. Finally, the TMAP Framework was improved with feedback from different experts throughout development and evaluation. The final version of the TMAP Framework contains 180 entities in a tree-like sorted structure on four levels. Alongside the contribution to knowledge to the design of technology-mediated audience participation in live music, the TMAP Framework has practical potential, making contributions to idea generation as well as guidance during design processes in this innovative and distinctive area of interaction design.22

Semantic Web and the Web of Things: concept, platform and applications

The ubiquitous presence of devices with computational resources and connectivity is fostering the diffusion of the Internet of Things (IoT), where smart objects interoperate and react to the available information providing services to the users. The pervasiveness of the IoT across many different areas proves the worldwide interest of researchers from academic and enterprises worlds. This Research has brought to new technologies and protocols addressing different needs of emerging scenarios, making difficult to develop interoperable applications. The Web of Things is born to address this problem through the standard protocols responsible for the success of the Web. But a greater contribution can be provided by standards of the Semantic Web. Semantic Web protocols grant univocal identification of resources and representation of data in a way that information is machine understandable and computable and such that information from different sources can be easily aggregated. Semantic Web technologies are then interoperability enablers for the IoT. This Thesis investigates how to employ Semantic Web protocols in the IoT, to realize the Semantic Web of Things (SWoT) vision of an interoperable network of applications. Part I introduces the IoT, Part II investigates the algorithms to efficiently support the publish/subscribe paradigm in semantic brokers for the SWoT and their implementation in Smart-M3 and SEPA. The preliminary work toward the first benchmark for SWoT applications is presented. Part IV describes the Research activity aimed at applying the developed semantic infrastructures in real life scenarios (electro-mobility, home automation, semantic audio and Internet of Musical Things). Part V presents the conclusions. A lack of effective ways to explore and debug Semantic Web datasets emerged during these activities. Part III describes a second Research aimed at devising of a novel way to visualize semantic datasets, based on graphs and the new concept of Semantic Planes.La presenza massiva di dispositivi dotati di capacità computazionale e connettività sta alimentando la diffusione di un nuovo paradigma nell'ICT, conosciuto come Internet of Things. L'IoT è caratterizzato dai cosiddetti smart object che interagiscono, cooperano e reagiscono alle informazioni a loro disponibili per fornire servizi agli utenti. La diffusione dell'IoT su così tante aree è la testimonianza di un interesse mondiale da parte di ricercatori appartenenti sia al mondo accademico che a quello industriale. La Ricerca ha portato alla nascita di tecnologie e protocolli progettati per rispondere ai diversi bisogni degli scenari emergenti, rendendo difficile sviluppare applicazioni interoperabili. Il Web of Things (WoT) è nato per rispondere a questi problemi tramite l'adozione degli standard che hanno favorito il successo del Web. Ma un contributo maggiore può venire dal Semantic Web of Things (SWoT). Infatti, i protocolli del Semantic Web permettono identificazione univoca delle risorse e una rappresentazione dei dati tale che le informazioni siano computabili e l'informazione di differenti fonti facilmente aggregabile. Le tecnologie del Semantic Web sono quindi degli interoperability enabler per l'IoT. Questa Tesi analizza come adottare le tecnologie del Semantic Web nell'IoT per realizzare la visione del SWoT di una rete di applicazioni interoperabile. Part I introduce l'IoT, Part II analizza gli algoritmi per supportare il publish-subscribe nei broker semantici e la loro implementazione in Smart-M3 e SEPA. Inoltre, viene presentato il lavoro preliminare verso il primo benchmark per applicazioni SWoT. Part IV discute l'applicazione dei risultati a diversi domini applicativi (mobilità elettrica, domotica, semantic audio ed Internet of Musical Things). Part V presenta le conclusioni sul lavoro svolto. La Ricerca su applicazioni semantiche ha evidenziato carenze negli attuali software di visualizzazione. Quindi, Part III presenta un nuovo metodo di rappresentazione delle basi di conoscenza semantiche basato sull’approccio a grafo che introduce il concetto di Semantic Plane

Public Service Communications Satellite User Requirements Workshop

Information on user requirements for public service communications was acquired to provide the basis of a study to determine the optimum satellite system to satisfy user requirements. The concept for such a system is described: Topics discussed included requirements for data and message services, elementary and secondary education, extension and continuing education, environmental communications, library services, medical education, medical services, public broadcasting, public safety, religious applications, state and local communications, and voluntary services. Information was also obtained on procedures to follow to make the transfer to commercial services