No Oil Painting: digital originals and slow prints

Slow technology is…in part a reaction against the impulses toward instantaneity afforded by digital technology. This paper explores the slow work of a contemporary ‘analogue’ painter in the context of current research enquiry into digital art, authenticity and value. A group of artists were recruited to take part in in depth interviews conducted in their studios. The paper describes the artist’s resolutely non digital practice and outlines a concept design for a ‘slow print’ based on his work

Repentir: Digital exploration beneath the surface of an oil painting

Repentir is a mobile application that employs marker-less tracking and augmented reality to enable gallery visitors to explore the under drawing and successive stages of pigment beneath an oil painting's surface. Repentir recognises the position and orientation of a specific painting within a photograph and precisely overlays images that were captured during that painting's creation. The viewer may then browse through the work's multiple states and closely examine its painted surface in one of two ways: sliding or rubbing. Our current prototype recognises realist painter Nathan Walsh's most recent work, "Transamerica". Repentir enables the viewer to explore intermediary stages in the painting's development and see what is usually lost within the materially additive painting process. The prototype offers an innovative approach to digital reproduction and provides users with unique insights into the painter's working method

Designing In With Black Box Technologies and PD

Building on prior work we examine design research challenges posed by working with new technological applications of Blockchain within multidisciplinary research. Drawing from recent design research of others, we articulate the value – and associated challenges – of Participatory Design creative approaches involving codesign of similar ‘black box’ technologies. We go on to report on three workshops, including one in which we invited technologists and designers to work together to talk through and materially represent their tacit understandings of how two Blockchain applications – BITNATION and Trust Stamp – work. We demonstrate how creative methods are useful in enabling critical reflection and knowledge exchange providing a useful bridge between radically different disciplines; to counter emerging technologies’ ‘unconscious image’ as magic; and to valuably inform on future oriented design implications

Creative Temporal Costings: A Proto-Publics Research Project with Leeds Creative Timebank

A key defining characteristic of timebanking is that all activities are valued equally and in terms of time, with an hour contributed by a legal expert rendered equivalent to an hour of dog-walking. Leeds Creative Timebank (LCT), shares this principle, but is currently the only UK bank dedicated to the collaborative exchange of time among creative practitioners. The team is working on an experimental social design intervention that explores the practices of collaborative exchange as experienced by, and through a co-commissioned study undertaken with LCT, to investigate the value(s) of creative collaborative exchange in this emerging parallel economy. The authors employed methods that allow them to work within the ethos and economy of the LCT, with each investigator having an equal number of hour-long denominations deposited for them in the bank, to enable participation in the bank on the same basis as other members. The assembled ‘hours’ were invested in individuals’ participation in two workshops and the co-production of two outputs: a research report and a creative publication. This experimental method assemblage allowed to explore how collaboration supports the creation of multiple values from within LCT, while also affording members a position from which to develop critical approaches to collaborative exchange from without

Alcohol and amphetamine dependencies convoluted with anorexia and bulimia nervosa

This study explored the possibility that some individuals with alcohol and amphetamine addictions are initially motivated to use alcohol and amphetamines because of underlying issues involving body dissatisfaction and weight reduction associated with Anorexia and Bilimia Nervosa. Current literature reveals similarities among chemical dependencies and eating disorders

Creative Toolkits for TIPS

We present a survey of toolkits employed in research workshop approaches within TIPS (Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security) domains. Our survey was developed within wider design research to develop prototypes that support people in evaluating whether to trust that an online actor’s identity is not recently faked, and that a service they are registering personal information with is legitimate; and a subsequent project involving a tool that invites people to reflect on the cumulative risks of sharing apparently harmless personal information online. The radically multidisciplinary nature of both these TIPS projects has determined that we create a research space to promote exchange to, as design researchers, better understand the ‘opaque’ immediate and longer term implications of our proposed services and invite cross-disciplinary discussion towards interdisciplinary understandings. This paper is intended as an at-a-glance resource, or indeed toolkit, for researchers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds working on TIPS research to inform on various different material engagements, with research stakeholders, through creative workshop approaches. Our survey focused on the literature from Design (especially Participatory Design and Codesign), Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and cybersecurity. It comprises 27 papers or toolkit examples organised across: review papers; example toolkits; case studies reporting relevant toolkit use; applied toolkits for learning/knowledge exchange; research toolkits focused on demonstrating a methodological-conceptual approach (some problematising emergent or near-future technologies); and two papers that straddled the latter two categories, focusing on future practical application. We begin with an overview of our rationale and method before presenting each group of texts in a table alongside a summary discussion. We go on to discuss the various material components, affordances and terminology of the toolkits along with core concerns often left out of the reporting of research; before going on to recognise toolkits not such much as a tool that identify and fix things but as a lose collection of readily available resources, used in particular socio-approaches that together help surface techno-relational vulnerabilities and contingencies in TIPS-related discourse

Troubling Vulnerability: Designing with LGBT Young People's Ambivalence Towards Hate Crime Reporting

HCI is increasingly working with ‘vulnerable’ people yet there is a danger that the label of vulnerability can alienate and stigmatize the people such work aims to support. We report our study investigating the application of interaction design to increase rates of hate crime reporting amongst Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender young people. During design-led workshops participants expressed ambivalence towards reporting. While recognizing their exposure to hate crime they simultaneously rejected ascription as victim as implied in the act of reporting. We used visual communication design to depict the young people’s ambivalent identities and contribute insights on how these fail and succeed to account for the intersectional, fluid and emergent nature of LGBT identities through the design research process. We argue that by producing ambiguous designed texts, alongside conventional qualitative data, we ‘trouble’ our design research narratives as a tactic to disrupt static and reductive understandings of vulnerability within HCI

Feminist Perspectives on Digitally Enabled Sustainable Fashion Consumerism

Fast fashion is not only an issue apropos of environmental pollution and feminism (Maynard, 2021), but also an area where HCI can make a difference. Fashion – comprising garment or apparel design, its supply chains and retail, and associated cultural ecosystem of fashion-related digital communications (see Harris et al., 2021) – has supported the position of women, as a powerful visual tool and by promoting their innovation, self-expression and social change (McRobbie, 2020).However, the relationship between fashion and feminism has recently become strained, due to ambiguity of claims that fashion promotes women’s empowerment, when fashion is also responsible for mass consumerism, further enabled by the rise of fintec

Projection mapping in the city: co-creating public digital installations for climate awareness with animation and interaction design undergraduates

We report from a project where students created animated public content to promote the urgency of climate change and encourage positive behavior change amongst a city's citizens and stakeholders. We worked with Newcastle City Council in the UK, whose Net Zero agenda has been formulated to mitigate and adapt to climate change, including by changing public perception and promoting more sustainable lifestyles. 32 final-year Animation and Interaction Design (IxD) undergraduate students worked in a collaborative design process to create seven site-specific public campaigns applying animation and projection mapping technologies. Educational challenges included working with new technology, delivering a professional quality result to an external client, and a short 8-week schedule. The results included an interactive game to engage the public in the concept of plastic bottle deposit recycling scheme; ‘guerilla’ projecting on a major clothing retail store intended to encourage passing shoppers to reflect on their role on the negative aspects of fast fashion; and an installation across some of the underground metro stations to highlight and celebrate the sustainability principles of public transport. Our contribution includes our case study of an agile structured collaborative process, with the dual focus of creating high-quality, engaging and site-specific creative content and promoting a specific aspect of the Council's policy agenda. Additionally, we discuss insights into tailoring projection mapping and animated content for civic communications purposes and encouraging digital animation students – who typically work on their production independently– to engage in collaborative processes and with civic responsibilities

T-Shifting Identities and Practices: Interaction Designers in the Fourth Industrial Age

We report findings from our two-year research study to investigate the practices, processes and roles of professional creatives working on interaction design and wider digital design projects. The study contributes insights from interviews conducted to support the development of 13 high profile industry case studies involving 21 of their creators. Through thematic analysis of interview transcripts we constructed key themes of Project Scope, Design Stances, Skills Sets and Studio Practice. We discuss these as representative of the perpetual shifting of the cornerstones of how designers have traditionally understood and embodied their own and peers’ roles and combinations of competencies. This, we argue, is challenging perceptions and expectations around designers’ traditional ‘T-shape’ organisation of skills and knowledge. The article goes on to identify areas of emerging design practice brought about by rapid technological changes associated with the Fourth Industrial Age that warrant further research. These include anticipatory design and personalisation, branded interactions and magic technology. The article concludes by calling for wide sharing of designers’ stories as a pragmatic resource to demonstrate and communicate emerging practices that support the development of graduates and other designers entering this rapidly-changing field