Evaluating visitor experiences with interactive art

The Music Room is an interactive installation that allows visitor to compose classical music by moving throughout a space. The distance between them and their average speed maps the emotionality of music: in particular, distance influences the pleasantness of the music, while speed influences its intensity. This paper focuses on the evaluation of visitors' experience with The Music Room by examining log-data, video footages, interviews, and questionnaires, as collected in two public exhibitions of the installation. We examined this data to the identify the factors that fostered the engagement and to understand how players appropriated the original design idea. Reconsidering our design assumptions against behavioural data, we noticed a number of unexpected behaviours, which induced us to make some considerations on design and evaluation of interactive art

Meaningful engagement: computer-based interactive media art in public space.

Interactive technologies, including electronic devices are increasingly being utilized as a medium for artistic expression and have been placed in freely accessible public environments with mixed results. When audiences encounter computer-based interactive media arts in a public space they are drawn by various interactivities, to play and experiment with them. However, whether the audience is able to gain a meaningful experience through those physical interactivities has remained an issue of both theoretical and practical debate. This paper will focus on these aspects, most specifically through the study of interactive art in freely accessible public space. The author proposes four new conceptual/analytical tools for examining the subject. It is anticipated that this paper will provide possible alternative strategies for both artists and art researchers in this field with a purpose to enhance intellectual engagement with their audiences, so as to succeed in leading interactors to obtain meaningful experience and rewards

Thinking with a New Purpose: Lessons Learned from Teaching Design Thinking Skills to Creative Technology Students

This paper reports on the insights gained from introducing design thinking into the final year of a UK university course where students created positive behavior change interventions. The rationale for the course design and teaching process are outlined, with a focus on design as engineering versus innovation process. The students took a design thinking journey using Stanford University d.school's 5-step approach of Empathize-Define-Ideate-Prototype-Test, and their journey is described in detail. We found that at first students found the Design Thinking approach counter-intuitive and confusing, yet throughout the process they recognized the strengths and opportunities it offers. On the whole, students reflected positively on their learning and on their re-evaluation of the role of a (service) designer. Lessons learned from a teaching point of view are also outlined, the most poignant being the realization that it was necessary to 'un-teach' design practices students had come to take for granted, in particular the view of design as a self-inspired, linear and carefully managed process

Obscuring Complexity and Performing Progress: Unpacking SDG Indicator 6.5.1 and the Implementation of IWRM

At a rhetorical level, the SDGs provide a unified global agenda, and their targets and indicators are believed to drive action for social and environmental transformation. However, what if the SDGs (and their specific goals and indicators) are more of a problem than a solution? What if they create the illusion of action through a depoliticised and technical approach that fails to address fundamental dilemmas of politics and power? What if this illusion continues to reproduce poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation? This paper addresses these questions through a focus on SDG 6.5.1 – the implementation of integrated water resources management (IWRM), measured on a 0-100 scale through a composite indicator. The paper presents an empirical analysis of SDG 6.5.1 reporting in Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Malaysia, and the UK, drawing on research from the Water Security and Sustainable Development Hub. An evidence review and series of expert interviews are used to interrogate the local politics of IWRM measurement, specifically three dilemmas of global composite indicator construction: (1) reductive quantification of normative and contested processes; (2) weak analysis of actually existing institutional capability, politics, and power; and (3) distracting performativity dynamics in reporting. The paper concludes that SDG 6.5.1 is an example of a 'fantasy artefact', and that in all countries in this study, IWRM institutions are failing to address fundamental and 'wicked' problems in water resources management. We find little evidence that these numbers, or the survey that gives rise to them, drive meaningful reflection on the aims or outcomes of IWRM. Instead, they tend to hide the actually-existing political and institutional dynamics that sit behind the complexity of the global water crisis

Involving Users in the Design of Sharing Economy Services

Involving users in the design of sharing economy services is important to re-alize the expected growth in this market. However, such involvement may be challenging due to the complexity and networked character of the service context. We present a case study showing how users' online feedback on novel design concepts may represent a viable approach to user involvement. In particular, the feedback provides insight into the strengths and weakness-es of proposed concepts as well as suggestions of relevance to the subsequent design process. On the basis of the case study, lessons learnt are discussed, as is needed future research.acceptedVersio

Improving Massive Alternance Scheme: the paradigmatic case history of the incubator of projectuality at the Ferrari school of Rome.

Since three years the Italian Ministery of Education (MIUR) has introduced a massive alternance scheme, completely new to Europe, whose implementation still shows several critical issues and requires a special effort by all potential players - schools, associations, enterprises, local communities, etc. - to design and experiment models and strategies capable to mitigate them. In this article we present the first validation of an approach, based on the simulation of innovation processes, that can be considered innovative in the context of the Italian School Work Alternance (SWA) scheme. The outcomes of the experimentation are encouraging and show an average increase of more than one point over ten in the student satisfaction with respect to that of peers who have experienced other schemes of SWA activities during the previous school year. Not by chance our proposal has been selected as best practice by the local association of the entrepreneurs. Despite of such positive result, as discussed in the body of the paper, there exists a considerable room for improvements

Spatial and Service Design: Guidelines Defining University Dormitories

Thispapercontributestothediscussionaboutrelationshipsbetween spatial and service design and how these two disciplines can interact and influence each other to achieve more complexity, capability and synergy in in a specific case such as university dormitories. Dormitories, university campuses, and schools, can be considered as urban community hubs through which syn- ergistic relations between the institution and the surrounding neighborhood take place. The paper investigates how dormitories can, starting with the contribution of the students, perform strategic actions in the socio-cultural and civil regen- eration of urban contexts. The aim is to delineate the various interactions and effective synergies, especially in relation to the most vulnerable and marginal- ized facets of the community, looking at the students’ dorm as places of social cohesion. The methodology is related to community-centered design using for example co-design tools to present relationships between spatial and service design particularly through the context of a collaborative design studio and the technical department of Politecnico di Milano