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!