A landscape of design: interaction, interpretation and the development of experimental expressive interfaces

This paper presents the initial research insights of an ongoing research project that focuses upon understanding the role of landscape, its use as a resource for designing interfaces for musical expression, and as a tool for leveraging ethnographic understandings about space, place, design and musical expression. We briefly discuss the emerging research and reasoning behind our approach, the site that we are focusing on, our participatory methodology and conceptual designs. This innovative research is envisaged as something that can engage and interest the conference participants, encourage debate and act as an exploratory platform, which will in turn inform our research, practice and design

Sound art and the making of public space

This paper draws on a collaborative sound art project that aimed to explore how sound art as a non-representational method might attract and produce new publics and re-signify iconic public spaces . We describe how the project, AGORA, proceeded and to what extent it transformed the spaces it was performed in and made new, if transient, publics in the moments of performance. This paper focuses on the British Museum and St George’s Church, Bloomsbury. In the Museum the contemplation and resignification provoked by the intervention enlivened the sacred character of the museum. We argue that this (re)sacralization can be experienced as a practice of decolonization, albeit perhaps limited to the space and time of the performance. The Church, already signified as a sacred space, provoked another kind of encounter with the sacred and the colonial. The extended period of reflection provoked by the performance made visible the etchings of colonialism in the fabric of the building. Our contribution is primarily to the geographic literature on non-representational theory in relation to sonic geographies and music geographies. This paper points to the potential of sound art to make us listen to spaces more attentively

The sensorium at work: the sensory phenomenology of the working body

The sociology of the body and the sociology of work and occupations have both neglected to some extent the study of the ‘working body’ in paid employment, particularly with regard to empirical research into the sensory aspects of working practices. This gap is perhaps surprising given how strongly the sensory dimension features in much of working life. This article is very much a first step in calling for a more phenomenological, embodied and ‘fleshy’ perspective on the body in employment, and examines some of the theoretical and conceptual resources available to researchers wishing to focus on the lived working-body experiences of the sensorium. We also consider some possible representational forms for a more evocative, phenomenologically-inspired portrayal of sensory, lived-working-body experiences, and offer suggestions for future avenues of research

Autosomal recessive chronic granulomatous disease caused by deletion at a dinucleotide repeat

Chronic granulomatous disease (CGD) is a rare inherited condition rendering neutrophils incapable of killing invading pathogens. This condition is due to the failure of a multicomponent microbicidal oxidase that normally yields a low-midpoint-potential b cytochrome (cytochrome b245). Although defects in the X chromosome-linked cytochrome account for the majority of CGD patients, as many as 30% of CGD cases are due to an autosomal recessive disease. Of these, greater than 90% have been shown to be defective in the synthesis of a 47-kDa cytosolic component of the oxidase. We demonstrate here in three unrelated cases of autosomal recessive CGD that the identical underlying molecular lesion is a dinucleotide deletion at a GTGT tandem repeat, corresponding to the acceptor site of the first intron-exon junction. Slippage of the DNA duplex at this site may contribute to the high frequency of defects in this gene

Engaging with Sense of Smell through Textile Interactions

This research paper discusses dimension of smell for designing spatial interactions through textiles. The focus in these design examples is combining the sense of touch to actuate the smells. Sense of touch is explored in terms of different tactile sensations that include pressing, rubbing and movement of the body. Through these tactile interactions smells embedded in the textile objects are released. The temporal textile expressions of smells open up for further investigations for designing spaces, as these design examples bring forward the olfactory expressions and proposes frameworks for future research in potential human-computer interactions through our everyday objects and surroundings. The proposal of textile interactions that engage sense of smell and create slow interactions with objects and situations from our daily lives opens up the opportunity to encourage more social interactions within the physical world. These interactions will include computational things, however, in a discreet manner, helping build deep bonds between human to human and human to environment