next project, The Rough Mile

The next foray into PED is our new audio-walk music gifting performance project, The Rough Mile.

Yes, that's a crazy mouthful. Totally inelegant. Is it a walk, a performance, a gift, a musical experience? All of the above! 

And if you're around Nottingham on either the 28th or the 29th of April, come give it a try! There's more information at bit.ly/1R9yXJP. 

hard copy, get yer hard copy

The hard copy version of my book is now available! Here's the blurb:

This book presents a novel framework for understanding and designing performative experiences with digital technologies. It introduces readers to performance theory and practice in the context of HCI and gives a practical and holistic approach for understanding complex interactions with digital technologies at the far end of third-wave HCI.

The author presents a step-by-step explanation of the Performative Experience Design methodology, along with a detailed case study of the design process as it was applied to co-located digital photo sharing. Finally, the text offers guidelines for design and a vision of how PED can contribute to an ethical, critical, exploratory, and humane understanding of the ways that we engage meaningfully with digital technology.

Researchers, students and practitioners working in this important and evolving field will find this state-of-the-art book a valuable addition to their reading.

<end blurb>

It's an academic text with a correspondingly hefty price tag. I highly recommend you highly recommend it to your librarian!

the e-book is loose!

Apparently, the e-book version of Performative Experience Design is available for purchase! I haven't seen the completed text myself, so fingers crossed that nothing went horribly wrong at the last minute.

Of course, these texts are meant for libraries and suchlike to purchase, so if you're not A) a librarian or B) a passionate devotee of performance in an HCI context with C) money to burn, please do not interpret this post as a request to boost my Amazon rankings!

More to the point, if this topic/blog/book is of interest, please get in touch! The more momentum we can get behind the intersection of HCI and performance - no matter what the terminology - the better off we all are.

getting my (mostly girly) name out there

When I was a kid, I didn't know a soul with my name. I didn't know a soul who had ever known a soul with my name. The first time I ever met someone who connected, it was when I was living in England at the age of 9. 'Jocelyn? That's an old family name. My uncle, my grandfather...'

I was mortified. I was 9. But as the years went on, I met more and more people with my name or versions thereof. All but one or two were women.

Fast forward to my first few weeks at the Mixed Reality Lab. Last Saturday I gave a talk at an event. And a week from Thursday, I'm giving a talk at another event. And the reason for both is that I'm female. I'm thinking this is possibly slightly bizarre, but positive and lovely. If anyone can glean something helpful from my experiences, more power to them!

Last Saturday was the Inspire Women in Tech event at Nottingham University, and the 10 March event is a Visible Women evening at Distinction. If you're around, come on down!

mixing my realities

While I am still very pleased to be counted as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Surrey, I am actually spending the bulk of 2016 at the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham. This afternoon marks the end of my second week here, and my head is officially exploding. I've tried to go against my natural grain and NOT pin down every single person for a protracted and extremely animated conversation within the first three days. This counterintuitive (to me) strategy has the added advantage that it gives me a half a chance to learn people's names a few at a time - a major bonus when you're as hopeless with names and faces as I am. But even though I've only properly spoken to a smallish fraction of the researchers here, I am totally blown away with ideas. And everyone's so friendly!

Part of my evil plan here is to write some proposals, a goal that at this point is far too grand and vague to even spell out for myself, much less blog about. But the other part of my evil plan is to bring PED to bear on one strand of the FAST project, funded by the EPSRC (EP/L019981/1) and involving Nottingham, Queen Mary University of London, and Oxford University. In a way, I'm bringing some of the findings of my work with the performance of personal digital photos into a project on performative experiences with personal digital music. Ephemerality and experience, placelessness and location, disembodiment and visceral responses... Again, very early days, but incredibly exciting! And made all the more so by the company I'm keeping, primarily Adrian Hazzard, Chris Greenhalgh, and Sean McGrath.

Springing to life

It's been awfully quiet on the PED front the last few months, but not for lack of developments. Instead, great news - a book on PED is coming out from Springer this May! I spent the past autumn in a deadline-meeting frenzy, and now I can distribute the link:

Performative Experience Design, the musical book!

This book is part of Springer's series on Cultural Computing, so it's skewed towards an HCI/interaction design/ experience design audience. While I hold staunchly to the idea that PED is a genuine hybrid of these fields and performance studies, it doesn't yet have enough traction to constitute its own marketing niche, so this text attempts to target the argument for the HCI audience.

I'm very keen to incorporate further developments into a text targeted to the theatre and performance communities, as well. Watch this space...

British HCI 2015

This time last week, I was swanning around Lincoln (not Licoln, Nebraska, as one friend suggested, but Lincoln, Lincolnshire) at the British HCI conference. There were plenty of heated discussions around the REF, centering on Alan Dix's impressive analysis of the results and their likely impact on HCI as a discipline. Executive summary: oh, crap.

This set the stage for heated discussions of what HCI researchers in the UK should do, strategically and tactically, to further our work. I argued strongly for taking advantage of the unusual, boundary-pushing work that so many of us are at the very forefront of. We should be celebrating what we're good at and using every available forum to promote what we do in the international community. Of course, we're no more homogeneous than the field as a whole, but we do have a disproportionate number of people doing intensely exciting, high-quality research that continually redefines the edge of HCI in terms of affect, emotion, felt experience, performativity, and all the stuff that makes humans so very different from the computational devices with which we interact. (Though maybe not for much longer...)

On Friday morning I gave a provocation paper on Performance and Critical Design, arguing that the kind of performance studies I've been working with for years can go a long way towards the kinds of practical advances advocated by Bardzell & Bardzell (2013). I only realised as I was putting together my presentation in the couple of weeks beforehand that I was going to have to spend a lot of my 15 minutes defining what the Bardzells mean by critical design to position performance alongside it, and if I wasn't careful, I was going to end up giving this talk as though I were representing them and their work. Their stuff is lovely, don't get me wrong, but it's not the focus of my research and I'd hate to mis-speak. I think I pulled it off without mangling any of their opinions, and I got lots of great feedback after the event. So it seems that Performantive Experience Design might have legs even outside the strict remit of the framework and methodology put forward so far.