priorities

Since July, my priorities have been on keeping my project(s) charging along, writing All The Papers, and making lots of good things happen so that I can stay on at the MRL - because on top of all that, my lovely other half and I have bought a disastrous pit of rubble house. We acquired said pit house in June, thinking we'd do a bit of necessary work over the summer, decorate it in October/November, and move in at the beginning of December. We estimated these timings while fully taking into account the dire warnings from everyone we know that such things always take three times longer than you think they should. Well, the status of said pit house went from bad to worse as soon as we bought it...  We moved in last week. It's mostly built and almost entirely undecorated, and still has consumed just about every waking moment from me and my lovely other half for the past six months.

In cases like these, work remains the top priority, with a roof over one's head a close second, and blogging about one's work slides down the list a bit. 

But I'm ringing in the new year with an exciting proposal! Come to Denver in early May and have fun with the cool kids of HCI! Deadline 27 January. https://mixedreality.tech.blog

Happy merry good things and a blissful 2017 to all :) 

another year older and deeper in debt

Deeper in debt to this blog only, thankfully nothing financial. My birthday came and went last week, reminding me that the last time I posted here, I was a whole year younger than I am now!

June found me in Stockholm for a week at the International Federation of Theatre Research conference, part of the Intermediality in Theatre and Performance Working Group. I took part in Barcelona back in 2013, when I was working on my thesis, a pure (or purist) pursuit of the amalgamation of performance studies and HCI. Three years later, I came to Stockholm as a researcher in a Computer Science department, working on an EPSRC project (and if that means nothing to you, read Extremely Prejudicial against Silly Research Cons, a.k.a. most arts research). I felt a bit of trepidation at the outset... but then the project was very well received, and I got a vast amount out of discussions around it. Really, this group could hardly be any more friendly and helpful.

Besides that - lots of meetings, workshops, bid-writing sessions, a small side project, two or three CHI papers in the works, and about a squillion hours spent on Part 2 of The Rough Mile (almost done, almost!), plus a nearly three-week visit from various family members - that's been about it for my June and July.

There was also a short-lived attempt to get a PED discussion going on LinkedIn, thwarted by the fact that said social network sent me no notification whatsoever when people responded to my post! I only noticed that I'd had some replies several weeks after the fact when I looked at my profile for another reason. Mostly, I'm embarrassed, but partly I'd like to have a wee word with their UI people. Seriously? I need to physically return to the page every time I wonder whether there's been a reply to a conversation I started? At this point, it's been a couple of weeks since I first realised I'd missed the conversation, and I've forgotten to post to the conversation that I hadn't seen the replies, because there's no function for engaging with me as a (very absent-minded) contributor. Clearly I've missed a trick here, and perhaps LinkedIn has, too. In any case, I'll try again to make contact with the outside world, and to maintain the conversation here.

yin and yang, CHI and Tapra

I had far too exciting of a time at CHI this year to get around to blogging about it for - how many weeks? - even though I was only at the conference for one day (and a party). I think I managed to cram in a good portion of the entire conference's worth of great conversations and interesting ideas into that short time frame, though! So many people! So many ideas! The excitement included the Springer author meet-and-greet for people who had recently published books with them. I'd love to be so cosmopolitan and jaded that such an event wouldn't even register, but that would be a lie and a half.

And then, just a week and a day after I got home from CHI, I was off to High Wycombe to present our ongoing project here at the MRL, The Rough Mile, at a practice-based performance event titled 'Returning Ghosts'. This was a symposium, every bit as intense as CHI but for exactly the opposite reason - there were only a handful of us there, but we were all intimately familiar with (and excited about) intermedial autobiographical performance. Where was this event when I was doing my PhD??? This was an interim event for the Performance and New Technologies Working Group, part of Tapra (the Theatre and Performance Research Association).

I feel like both halves of my brain have now been equally overstimulated, and I'm ready to take on the world! (Which you can tell because I've been too preoccupied taking over the world to post here...)

what's exciting in performance-land

Soon to be hot off the presses: the 'drama and performance studies' chapter of the 2016 edition of The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, courtesy of the lovely and talented Patrick Duggan and myself. I'm very excited that Patrick brought me into the YWCCT fold. It's an opportunity to submerge myself in all the best book-length writing in the field(s) of theatre, performance, and drama, and then come up with an (entirely unbiased) discussion of (what Patrick and I find to be) the most salient, compelling, trend-setting, and otherwise noteworthy ideas from 2015. I had a grand time working on it, and we hope you will have a grand time reading it when it's out!

Working at the Mixed Reality Lab keeps me very tightly anchored in HCI and computer science, so while I spend a lot of my time evangelising for performance studies, it's always against the backdrop of worthy projects on algorithmic optimisational graphene flux capacitors... ok, I might be exaggerating a bit, but some of these MRL folk are doing some pretty hard-core stuff.

Working on the YWCCT chapter is a wonderful chance for me to turn the tables and immerse myself in the norms and expectations of an unabashedly arts-centric academic community. The work I'm doing now in PED gets me even more motivated to view the performance elements of what I do in their own right, not simply as feeders into HCI's giant maw.

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.

Butt Dial

One of the many good things about Glasgow is that it's not horrendously far from Newcastle, at least not in the grand scheme of things. I took advantage of my week Up North to add on a weekend Up Almost As North to start work on the next Would-be Nuns and Cowboys performance with Claire Murphy-Morgan.

Aside from a lovely weekend's hospitality from Claire and her still-fairly-new husband Simon, we got on by leaps and bounds with the new work. We started from nothing, or almost nothing, as I presented her with a bit of digital ephemera to get us thinking - the voicemail of the time she butt-dialled me last month.

From that humblest of beginnings, we have a new performance taking shape. It's far too formless to describe at this point and will doubtless change utterly by the time it's ready to be done for an audience, but we have enough to move forward with, and it's really exciting! Plus, as working titles go, you've gotta love Butt Dial. Or at least we do.

Performing digital media design

I spent the past week at the ACM Creativity and Cognition conference hosted by the Glasgow School of Art and the City of Glasgow. The opening keynote by Steve Benford set the tone for a playful, exploratory, but ultimately rigorous and complex mix of creative expression and computing technology. The closing keynote, by Marcos Novak, nearly blew everyone's head apart with the tantalising density of his references - I'm pretty sure that if he had spoken for every minute of the three-day main conference, I would have understood and loved a good chunk of what he had to say. In between the two was a fiesta of interesting people doing some fantastic work. It's got me itching to dive into a new project myself.

In the spirit of reaching out beyond my own work, I ran a full-day workshop on 'performing digital media design' on Thursday. It was structured around a hands-on exploration of the Collect Yourselves! system. The workshop participants and I dived into the devising phase in the morning - a version created specially for the workshop context - and performed in the afternoon. Around and about I gave some background on the theories and practices that informed the project and the Performative Experience Design methodology it emerged from (or gave rise to, depending on how you look at it). We did a little coded performance analysis - just verbally, nothing too taxing for midafternoon - and had good conversations throughout about the tensions between visual and performance aesthetics, the role of improvisation and public engagement, and the dynamics of conversation, among many other things.

A million thanks to Robyn Taylor for helping me out, especially when the tech fell apart for not one but two separate reasons, both of which were unlike any of the ways it fell apart during previous sessions, and neither of which emerged in any of the testing I did in the week leading up to the workshop. I think my next research focus should be to document and theorise the vast array of ways that tech can collapse in a heap. I'll aim to collect at least two near-catastrophic failures for each piece of fieldwork. I figure that's the only way I can guarantee myself an error-free encounter.

(For the record, I did manage to get everything working, but it ate into 15 minutes of our afternoon and cost me any chance to eat lunch that day. It's amazing how far a handful of almonds and a cup of peppermint tea can take you.)

If you're at all curious about the workshop, drop me a line!

LiSC talk

Summer seems to be time to talk, and talk, and talk and talk and talk! Last Friday I had the great pleasure of giving a talk at the invitation of the University of Lincoln's Social Computing research centre. What a friendly, interesting bunch of people! Doing some pretty wacky things! I understand they're aiming to promote interdisciplinary research, so I titled my talk

Designing performance into HCI: How to get an interaction design PhD with craptastic coding skills

Now I know that self-deprecation isn't always a good approach when trying to make one's way in the world, particularly the world of academia. And I am not-so-secretly very proud of the fact that I coded the application that formed the heart of my PhD thesis (with help from some extremely patient friends). But the alternate universe where I am a skilled and knowledgeable computer programmer lies at several removes from the one where I am an (insert adjectives here) researcher in performance and HCI. The premise of my talk was that it's possible to get a PhD by doing a modified form of interaction design without coming at it from a computer science background, much less a computer science perspective. (To top it all off, my paperwork tells me my degree is actually a PhD in Theatre. Who knew?)

In any case, I really enjoyed the opportunity to talk about Performative Experience Design with the gracious folks at LiSC!

Mixed Reality Lab talk

This past Friday I gave a talk at the University of Nottingham's Mixed Reality Lab, at the kind invitation of Steve Benford. The talk was held in a fairly normal-looking room, the most unusual aspect of which was the fact that the projector worked. Easily. Immediately. First try. Running off of an ancient Mac. Could anything be more impressive than that?

The answer was an emphatic yes. I chatted away afterwards with a really interesting collection of people and tried to convey to them the legendariness, the aura, that surrounds the MRL. They didn't seem to believe me... but the types of stuff they're up to and interested in convinced me that the legend-aura-ness is well deserved.

Everyone was hospitable and lovely, the campus was gorgeous (though discreetly hidden behind a car dealership), and I had loads of attentive folks at my talk on 'Performative Experience Design and the aesthetics of performance'. I even got to strum the Carolan guitar. Now there's a day well spent!

PED: the workshop!

I'll be offering a workshop on Performing Digital Media Design at the Creativity & Cognition conference in Glasgow on Thursday 25 June.

It'll be a full day of hands-on performative experience, so to speak. We'll all use the Collect Yourselves! digital media performance system to create a performance for each other (no audiences or video cameras, so don't be shy). We'll have insights into performance theory and practice relevant for experience design, a few examples to watch, some performance analysis, some design playtime, and plenty of conversation about everyone's own research interests.

Participation is capped at 8 to get the most out of Collect Yourselves! and to make sure no one gets lost in the fray. And to top it all off, I'll have the support of the fabulous Robyn Taylor from Culture Lab.

You can find more details about the workshop on the C&C15 website. Any questions, give me a yell, j.c.spence at surrey.ac.uk. And if you're a native Glaswegian, you can entertain yourself by watching my face contort from concentrating all my energies on understanding what it is you're saying!

Storytelling for Development

Right now I'm almost halfway through a six-month project called Storytelling for Development, which is piloting digital storytelling as an approach for increasing community engagement in urban redevelopment processes, and for creating a two-way exchange between communities and the architects, planners, and councils who do the redevelopment.

What's particularly exciting in terms of performance is the strand of work that uses digital storytelling - essentially the making of little 'mini-movies' out of still images and voiceover narration - in a community workshop, where people who have made digital stories screen their work for each other and use them as a springboard for discussion. This will take their stories out of the virtual mustiness of the digital archive and into relationship with each other. I can't wait to see if the participants respond solely in conversation or if they feel inspired to make new digital stories as well.

I'm also keen to see what happens in the final stage of the project, where employees from our partners at Farrells architect planners create digital stories in response to all the community stories that get created. I'm hoping that some of the holistic and humane point of view that comes through in these stories will give the architects a new angle on the redevelopment process, and might even inspire new design ideas. Of course, it might not. It might be a pain in the rear and a complete dead end. Even the community workshops might lead nowhere. But you never know until you try...

catching up

I had lunch overlooking the River Wey yesterday with the ever-fabulous Robyn Taylor, who does some amazing work on designing from within - bringing performance into the design space and even the designed artefact. Her work on the humanaquarium project has been a great focal point for Peformative Experience Design, and it features in John McCarthy and Peter Wright's new book, Taking [A]part: The Politics and Aesthetics of Participation in Experience-Centered Design. If you're remotely interested in this area and haven't run across Robyn's work before, you should definitely take a look.

Interactive and live performance design with children

PED has been taken up with a fantastic twist by researchers at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. Their paper is titled Interactive and live performance design with children, and it's well worth a look.

Digital Creativity paper

Michael Nitsche edited a really exciting special issue of Digital Creativity (24:2) that explored the emergence of a truly substantive, productive mix of performance art and digital media.

Our contribution to that special issue is titled 'Performative Experience Design: Where autobiographical performance and human-computer interaction meet'. It was written about halfway through the project it is based on, but it's pointing in the right direction.

You can find it on my academia.edu page for that paper, free for the first however many downloaders, by clicking the 'tandfonline.com' link towards the top of the page.

I'd say the whole issue is worth a good look, though.