A Night at the Museum

Research project in collaboration with industry and a student internship. Premise: user experience design within museums traditionally encompasses learning from visitors’ physical interactions and offering interactive exhibits on site. Heritage sites and other public resources have utilised apps that run on visitors’ own devices. With the advent of 5G, there are now opportunities to literally bring displays to life utilising technology such as AR, generating new forms of audience engagement.

Design Hacks: Flips and Tips for Pedagogic Innovation

This conference presentation summarized the findings of the 2018/19 UWE Pedagogic Project "Design Thinking as a Pedagogic Tool: Innovating the Liminal Learning Process". The project investigated how design thinking approaches could be used as an effective pedagogic tool for innovating (liminal) learning experiences for different kinds of subject knowledge, and employed an interdisciplinary and collaborative methodology, involving staff and student co-creators from four different academic disciplines.

Putting the Player in the Picture; Biofeedback and Embodied Affect

This conference presentation summarized the findings of the Affective Pong Game project. Summary: The problem faced by those developing games, whether for entertainment or educational purposes, is how to create engaging and inclusive forms of participation. Interaction is a two-way process and whilst there are many ways of feeding information about a virtual space to a user, the same cannot be said in reverse. This paper investigates whether and how sonified biofeedback, provided by electrocardiogram and galvanic skin response sensors, could be used to create a greater sense of involvement in virtual spaces.

Arts and Humanities Perspectives in Studying Intertidal Areas

Invited talk and sonification workshop, based on Michaela's previous sonification work of Severn Estuary tides. This built on earlier work by Palmer and Jones that discusses data sonification as an experimental aesthetic, geo-poetic, and techno-scientific creative procedure for making explicit the generative processuality of elemental landscape/ ecosystems/ habits. Focusing on immersion (sea covering marsh in cyclical rhythms), exchange between ‘bodies’ (salt from water to plant and beyond), and other micro and macro temporalities of process, Palmer and Jones approached sonification as a more elemental, ecological and experiential, rather than a purely quantitative, articulation (individual data streams), thus allowing sonification to respond to, and express, the great complexity of ongoing ecological becoming.