Abstract: This article explores the observation that highly limiting, creative decisions of voluntary self-binding that radically prune the design solution space may in fact fuel and accelerate the process toward an innovative final design. To gain insight into this phenomenon, we propose the concept ‘decisive constraints’ based on a review of current, but dispersed, studies into creativity constraints. We build decisive constraints on two definitional conditions related to radical decision-making and creative turning points. To test our concept analytically and ensure its relevance to creative practice, we apply the two definitional conditions to three media facade installation projects in which our interaction design research lab has been involved. In accord with insights from these case analyses, we argue that decisive constraints may inform current research into design processes and act as a creative resource for practitioners, not only in interaction design but, we assume, also across related creative ...

Abstract: Innovations in digital cultural communication for museums challenge us to develop appropriate methods for participation in curatorial processes and to rethink the role of audiences inside exhibitions. The article explores the potentials of scaffolding sites of dialogue and creative engagement through the design process and final exhibition. It draws upon experiences from an interactive exhibition project, Digital Natives, in which we combined principles from Participatory Design with issues of contemporary digital culture to explore possibilities for creating heritage innovation. We suggest three critical stages of the dialogic design process in which engagement between stakeholders, researchers, and audiences can be central to shaping and transforming future conceptions of digital cultural heritage, through process and final exhibition. In this way, we argue that a participatory design anthropological approach to digital culture can expand opportunities for heritage innovation through technologic...

Abstract: This article describes the design and development of a context-aware ubiquitous learning (u-learning) system for users to increase fitness-related reading comprehension in a fitness centre. With the use of mobile devices and sensing technologies, practitioners and researchers of ICT and ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) are paying attention to the planning and use of u-learning components to provide users more interactions with authentic learning objects in a real context. Meanwhile, English for specific purposes (ESP) with interaction design has been a focus in recent years; however, few ESP practitioners and researchers have explored fitness-related English with ubicomp. All of the users were satisfied with the use of the smart phones and scanning of QR codes on the machines in the fitness centre to develop their reading comprehension of fitness-related English. Finally, a learning design model for Fitness English reading with u-learning components was developed and elaborated from designers' persp...

Abstract: A matter of concern for dialogic institutions such as museums is the struggle to find appropriate ways of integrating social media and digital technologies into dialogues with visitors. This paper addresses how co-creation and experimental methods may be applied in a situated, natural environment, exploring how these technologies may be shaped to support museum visitor relations. The concept ‘experimental zone’ is suggested as a format for a collaborative design space where digital media-based dialogues are explored in line with professional practices. This concept is discussed in relation to two design experiments undertaken in collaboration with the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology.

Abstract: Fashion as a phenomenon cannot be understood independently of the visual images and designed presentations that convey the content and forms of fashion. With the breakthrough of the digital media in the 2000s we were introduced to new ways of communicating and staging fashion where the blog in particular has established a new media culture for the distribution and exchange of potential fashion-based self-presentation forms and resulted in new design strategies. In this article, the fashion blog is presented as a specific genre that is characterised by remediating existing genre forms and combining them into new formats, where amateur bricolage approaches are combined with the reproduction of familiar features from the established fashion media. The article presents four types of fashion blogs, each representing a specific design strategy for presenting and interacting with fashion content. In closing, it is argued that the fashion blog as a phenomenon, on the one hand, has placed the ordinary fash...

Abstract: Projection mapping is a group of techniques for projecting imagery onto physical three-dimensional objects in order to augment the object or space with digital content. Most projection mapping experiences and events are non-interactive, partly because of the many inherent design problems in designing for interaction is such situations. This article explores one approach to this tricky issue by analysing a group of four interactive mixed reality experiences that combine projection mapping with camera-based interaction techniques. The approaches used are described, and their deployment in a variety of situations is analysed using engagement and play theories. The works suggest that some projection mapping techniques can be used in the service of creating engaging interactive exhibits and installations, but that the effectiveness of the approach relies on it placing the experience and interactions clearly in our own physical world, rather than behind a screen or in an artificial image space.

Abstract: As the role of museums has shifted from collection-driven institutions to experience-centred environments, researchers in museology have felt a growing need to understand how visitors experience and engage in exhibitions. Defining design museums as sites of meaning-making through diverse interactions and co-creative experiences, we examine dialogue as a means of encouraging visitors' active participation and creative engagement in design exhibitions. This article presents a theoretical framework based on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism and carnival theory. Four kinds of dialogic engagement are identified to illustrate different ways of engagement and co-creation in design museums through the analysis of example exhibitions.

Abstract: This article brings together the disparate worlds of dance practice, motion capture and statistical analysis. Digital technologies such as motion capture offer dance artists new processes for recording and studying dance movement. Statistical analysis of these data can reveal hidden patterns in movement in ways that are semantically ‘blind’, and are hence able to challenge accepted culturo-physical ‘grammars’ of dance creation. The potential benefit to dance artists is to open up new ways of understanding choreographic movement. However, quantitative analysis does not allow for the uncertainty inherent in emergent, artistic practices such as dance. This article uses motion capture and principal component analysis (PCA), a common statistical technique in human movement recognition studies, to examine contemporary dance movement, and explores how this analysis might be interpreted in an artistic context to generate a new way of looking at the nature and role of movement patterning in dance creation.

Abstract: Sonic interaction design studies how digital sound can be used in interactive contexts to convey information, meaning, aesthetic and emotional qualities. This area of research is positioned at the intersection of sound and music computing, auditory displays and interaction design. The key issue the designer is asked to tackle is to create meaningful sound for objects and interactions that are often new. To date, there are no set design methodologies, but a variety of approaches available to the designer. Knowledge and understanding of how humans listen and interpret sound is the first step toward being able to create such sounds.This article discusses two original approaches that borrow techniques from film sound and theatre. Cinematic sound highlights how our interpretation of sound depends on listening modes and context, while theatre settings allow us to explore sonic interactions from the different perspectives of the interacting subject, the observer and the designer.

Abstract: This article presents the key components required to properly understand remote creative interactions associated with three collective design stages: co-definition; the ideas co-production; and the co-evaluation in the formulation of a design concept. We compare five brainstorming modalities: traditional brainstorming—graphical interaction, reverse brainstorming, brainwriting and brainsketching—adopted by six delocalised teams working through a cloud computing environment. We analyse: co-authoring production; the ratio of ideas production according to task-goal; and the variation of brainstorming modalities. Our results show that designers work on brainstorming modalities according to the task-goal assigned, and we see that task content and the verbal and graphical communicative modes are supported by the proposed computational environment; as well as all brainstorming modalities. Because co-authoring or collective sketching are hardly possible without verbal communication support in graphical pro...

Abstract: This article discusses The Journey as a metaphor for design and development of the app Kunstporten (Art gate) for mobile and iPod. The goal of the project was to go beyond traditional mobile guides and support young visitors' various and contiguous experiences with art. The project involved seven Norwegian art museums over the period 2012–2013. The article focuses on the choices and challenges we as museum professionals met during the design of the app. It reports on how the dialogic concept of museum communication, integrated in the metaphor of The Journey, was shaped and adjusted in the design, planning and development of modules, multimedia content and procedural structure that may support art experience as a journey. The article describes considerations undertaken by museum practitioners in processes of creating museum communication that goes across multiple mediational platforms.

Abstract: The shifting participation paradigm for libraries, archives and museums (LAMs) has caused some frictions within institutional contexts. In particular, this article looks at institutional reluctance to the increasing focus on openness and open data in the context of the large-scale portal Europeana as well as wider EU policy. We look at the case study of the fictional archive IICADOM, constructed by the artist and filmmaker Jasper Rigole, as a potential source of inspiration for traditional institutional contexts. We argue that lessons can be learned from the fictional example's digital engagement practice for creative approaches to open (G)LAMs (including galleries), with a focus on the level of openness in terms of licence, attitudes to risk, the strategic choice of interacting with external platforms and fostering creative reuse.

Abstract: For his JPEGs series started in 2002, German artist Thomas Ruff used digital photographs taken by himself and from the web, compressed using the maximum rate, and then decompressed into large-scale prints. This method of hypercompression and enlargement exposes the mathematical infrastructure of the JPEG image, i.e. the pixel blocks into which the image is split during the compression process. In so doing, Ruff turns a digital artefact (pixilation) into a default aesthetic, thereby exposing the JPEG as today's default mode of viewing images: online and on-screen. Based on a thorough study of JPEG compression and its artistic use by Ruff, we show that with this shift from geometric projection to algorithmic processing, ‘photographic’ no longer denotes a specific mode of image creation, but rather a specific mode of image processing and that the new ‘architectural order’ of the image is the mathematical matrix used during compression.

Abstract: This article presents a heuristic approach for analysing computer-based interactive art by the extent to which it produces an interaction, and by whether participants are able to gain a meaningful experience from the interaction. Interactive installations responding to participants' physical input have been increasingly displayed in public spaces outside conventional art domains. Nevertheless, people in such public spaces are often unaccustomed to engaging with art intellectually. Thus, although the interactive artwork with responsive multimedia effects are, to some extent, more capable of prompting physical engagements, it is not always clear whether participants are able to develop meaningful experiences from such interactive encounters. Here, an analytical framework for reviewing such experiences has been developed from examinations of interactive experiences on site, along with interviews with advisors, professionals in the field and the originating artists. Examples of the frameworks' application to ...

Abstract: This article discusses three compositions for autonomous laptops performing with improvising musicians. The laptops were programmed with software environments that make narrow-band ‘decisions’ regarding performative soundscapes. They also made ‘decisions’ about visual materials that were presented as onscreen scores for the human improviser to consider. The unfolding aural and visual streams were both functional and creative, and highlighted the here-and-now of indeterminate composition, whilst carefully embedding the aesthetics of the composer within the core of the programming. As such, these laptops were considered as collaborating performers and collaborating composers. The opening section highlights the connecting principles within this collection of works, before discussing each in isolation. This is placed within the context of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first- century composition, whilst offering a framework, for the reading of these, based on Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome ph...

Abstract: Remembering Bogle Chandler is a digital narrative that incorporates photos, line drawings, text and sound playable using a graphical user interface (GUI). The work describes the characters and events surrounding the mysterious deaths of Gilbert Bogle and Margaret Chandler in Sydney on New Year's Day 1963. Users can retrieve and play 104 movie clips (photographic images, animations, text and sound) from the project's digital library. The GUI is both an image illustrating connections between movie clips and an instrument for controlling them.Remembering Bogle Chandler tells an old story in a new way. In order to explore the novel qualities of the work, this article employs terminology and concepts from three essentialist theories of digital media that define the ways in which digital media differ from old or legacy media. To assess the impact of these properties on storytelling, the article also explores audience responses to the work.

Abstract: With a growing number of embedded digital experiences in arts and heritage settings, creating a broad global field, this article focuses on the use of mobile phones in the engagement of humans with the cultural heritage of public spaces, specifically those that require a promenade from one outdoor space to another. This article discusses findings from a recent promenade initiative, commissioned for a UK arts festival, along with a review of literature, to critically engage with growing evidence of the diverse ways in which technology is integrated at direct user level. Concepts of ‘hybrid spaces’ and ‘user agency’ are discussed, along with the ‘performativity’ of spaces. Central to the discussion is the function of narrative in engaging the participant to construct new perspectives, which are facilitated by the mediating role of personal media devices between subject, narrative, space and community.

Abstract: This text offers a brief review of a recent conference held at the University of California Berkeley, in the Fall 2013, titled Queerness and Games.

Abstract: Creating facial expressions manually needs to be enhanced through a set of easy operating rules, which involves adjectives and the manipulating combinations of facial design elements. This article tries to analyse viewers' cognition of artificial facial expressions in an objective and scientific way. We chose four adjectives – ‘satisfied’, ‘sarcastic’, ‘disdainful’, and ‘nervous’ – as the experimental subjects. The manipulative key factors of facial expressions (eyebrows, eyes, pupils, mouth and head rotation) were used to create permutations and combinations and to make 81 stimuli of different facial expressions with a 3-D face model in order to conduct a survey. Next, we used Quantification Theory Type I to find the best combinations that participants agreed on as representing these adjectives. The conclusions of this research are that: (1) there are differences in adopting facial features between creating artificial characters' expressions and recognising real humans' expressions; (2) using sur...

Abstract: Three-dimensional projection installations are particular kinds of augmented spaces in which a digital 3-D model is projected onto a physical three-dimensional object, thereby fusing the digital content and the physical object. Based on interaction design research and media studies, this article contributes to the understanding of the distinctive characteristics of such a new medium, and identifies three strategies for designing 3-D projection installations: establishing space; interplay between the digital and the physical; and transformation of materiality. The principal empirical case, From Fingerplan to Loop City, is a 3-D projection installation presenting the history and future of city planning for the Copenhagen area in Denmark. The installation was presented as part of the 12th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2010.

Abstract: This article introduces a case study undertaken in the indigenous Penan community of Long Lamai, Upper Baram, Sarawak, Malaysia. In this community, there is concern about the negative image other cultural groups hold of the Penan. This case study explores co-design as a means to invite community members, together with a designer, to explore the identity that they would like to present to people outside the community. In preparing for an exhibition to challenge perceptions, it turned out to be important to embrace the culture of the community to facilitate self-expression, introducing new concepts such as technological interventions and design probes to stimulate reflection and creativity. However, it was indigenous material culture, when actively and encouragingly supported by the designer, that had a key role in developing the co-design and, with it, empathic understanding between designer and community.

Abstract: In this article, we elucidate a socio-culturally framed approach to supporting children's creative museum engagement. Specifically, we focus on social activities and socio-cultural resources that can act as boundary-permeating objects in mediating children's creative engagement and collaborative sense-making regarding cultural content within, across and beyond the spatio-material context of the museum. We contend that designing and organising children's creative engagement and collaborative sense-making in ways that cultivate boundary-crossing broadens opportunities for engagement and leverages children's creative potential and expansive learning. We build our argument by starting with a theoretical introduction to the design principles that constitute the Kids, Museums, and Technology Programme. We will illuminate the design principles of the programme with empirical examples and consider how the design principles and their situated construction can help us re-imagine museum exhibitions as hybrid...

Abstract: As museums extend their scope beyond traditional exhibition spaces and into everyday practices and institutions, it is necessary to develop suitable conceptualisations of how technology can be understood and designed. To this end, I propose the concept of infrastructures, as both social and material, as a useful frame for discussing important challenges and opportunities in terms of designing for audience engagement. I further argue that when designing infrastructures, an important challenge is to develop the social aspects of infrastructures in terms of creating, maintaining and developing relationships between organisations and communities. I argue that this is as much an object of design as technical interactive systems and discuss the relational work undertaken in this activity. The ideas of infrastructure and relational work is illustrated through a case describing the design of a system for cultural heritage engagement for Danevirke museum covering issues relating to the Danish minority in n...

Abstract: The article analyses the creativity in a particular category of interactive products—personal portfolio websites. Most of the designers embraced the advantages of a digital portfolio which include the ability to make an unlimited number of copies at a very low price, availability through email and presence on the global job market. In trying to impress possible employers, designers often got more concerned with following advices offered by web design agencies on the web today rather than focusing on the quality of user experience. The question is can the rules of good web portfolio design be defined and/or can they be perceived as a process of creating new choices out of a prevailing set of options? The goal of this article is to provide an overview of work in this area and analyses it to speculate on what makes web portfolio creative as a narrative interactive product.

Abstract: This article proposes the notion of ‘agency mechanics’ as an innovative design element of video games. It begins by exploring the well-documented interactive elements of horror cinema, and goes on to explore how strategies such as the sadistic/masochistic gaze and narrative perspective have been further developed in video games. It then explores work to date on the manipulation of interactivity in video games before closely analysing how agency and control are managed in the survival horror franchise Dead Space. It concludes with reflections on further research in the nexus between film and games, and further possibilities for game design through the explicit management of agency mechanics.