A Simple Case Study—The Pure Drop Front Page
The Pure Drop is an interactive documentary of world music, commissioned by the ABC and created by Ether Multimedia, and has twelve themed episodes, plus several related videos, interviews, mp3s and articles. I was consulted on the interaction on the front page, amongst other things. The front page tree graphic was drawn by Reg Mombassa, and had been used in the site’s prototype with a simple image rollover for navigation (try the prototype here).
Summary of Redevelopment
The positioning of elements on the prototype was inconsistent with the rest of the site (which can be OK on some sites, but here I thought that the alternative navigation—people, instruments, etc.—had been buried too much), so, having styled the rest of the site, I rearranged the front page to match.
In user testing, I found that the prototype’s rollovers didn’t work very well. When an image is rolled over, it actually becomes less prominent, as the text appears on a pale background. Additionally, the episode title can appear beneath the cursor, meaning that users had to move the cursor out of the way to read it. Compounding this, the descriptive text appears above the tree, away from the eye and mouse cursor. Users were tempted to move the mouse pointer up to follow the eye, or to click the text which had just appeared. Of course, moving the pointer towards the text made it go away again.
My redevelopment positioned the episode title and descriptive text near to, but not overlapping, the cursor or clickable area. I also made the typography more legible, and asked the writer to tighten up the descriptions. Given the multimedia nature of the rest of the site, I thought it was important to make the animation more sophisticated, so we commissioned an animator to make elements of the tree grow large to show the episode text. I made the episode images gain focus and colour, rather than lose it, when the mouse was moved over them.
(Apart from the CSS, my changes throughout the rest of the site were small, but important. For example, I named page sections “Dig Deeper” and “The Big Picture”, to indicate the changes of focus; The addition of the word ‘Home’ to the Pure Drop logo indicates the picture’s purpose as a link; Every link to an mp3 file has a small music player added with Javascript.)
Ph.D Research
The second study of my Ph.D research was a grounded theory study of the roles of technologists in interactive art collaborations, which is a quintessential example of supporting creative people who are using computers. _(Grounded theory is a social research methodology in which a theory emerges which is grounded in observed data. Used in an HCI context, the methodology can provide extremely rich usability design theories about complex and uncontrollable contexts of use.)_ My theory has given us a new way to understand artist–technologist collaborations as dynamic processes of attuning, through social relations, through the technologist’s role, and through technology.
For example, I found that ‘playing’ with technological ‘toys’ is crucial to the development of interactive art systems, for the following reasons, most of which are particular aspects of attuning:
- finding the rules that govern the behaviour of an algorithm,
- developing the ‘tendencies’ or character of the system,
- intuitively learning the ‘language’ and capabilities of the algorithm by:
- making the algorithm’s place within the system apparent—highlighting the structural interactions and limitations
- exposing the potentials of the algorithm’s dynamics,
- providing a realtime response to artists’ actions,
- producing computational, technological and artistic meaning simultaneously (which reduces ambiguity, produces successful boundary objects, and so assists interdisciplinary attuning),
- making the artist feel more comfortable and empowered,
- incorporating both synthetical and analytical approaches to problem solving, and
- taking the technologist’s interpretation out of the loop.
These toys, then, are boundary objects that embody a language for creating meaning between artist and technologist, and artist and computer, and perhaps less necessarily, technologist and computer. There is also scope for these toys to become boundary objects for other communities, such as audience members, other artists and technologists, researchers and curators. (For more information, see chapter 7 of my thesis.)
Cardiomorphologies
The theory is developed in the third study, in which I developed examples of these technological toys, which were used by the artist George Khut in the development of his piece Cardiomorphologies. These toys were designed for George to understand how to map the signals of input data to the sound and graphics engines, without needing either to learn a deeper programming language or to rely on the aesthetic interpretation of a third-party programmer such as myself. (For more information, see chapters 8 and 9 of my thesis.)
Australian Screen Timeline
Australian Screen is an compendium of thousands of clips from the archives of several Australian film institutions. I was commissioned to develop the site’s video player, and its interactive timeline, which shows each clip, grouped by category, over the course of the past 100 years. Clicking on a title shows the thumbnail and a link to clips from each title. Visit the site (the site is due to launch in mid-2007—if you wish to see the preview site, please contact me for a login).
The timeline (login required) is developed in Flash, and displays data on-the-fly from the Australian Screen’s database. An important technical and usability challenge was how to allow the user to navigate up to 3000 films when there is not the screen real estate to show them all at once, nor the computer processing power to animate them all. My solution involves a fairly sophisticated zooming and cacheing function, which shows the most important titles at first, then progressively introduces less-important titles as the user zooms in.
Sea.nce
The sea.nce takes place in a networked environment, in which the audience is not necessarily physically co-located, with each member logging on to the Flash-based interface. Through a system which relays the collectivised motion of the players’ avatars, the planchette (the ouija board’s pointer) is moved around the board from letter to letter. When the planchette lands on a letter it responds with the sounds of the spoken alphabets selected, according to the ‘e.motionographic’ results of the players’ ‘e.motions’, from over twenty languages. This selection ‘audiolises’ the networked emotions of the players. At the same time players type their interpretations, questions, feelings, thoughts and ideas into the message box, creating a corresponding textual cacophony.
The piece was developed for ISEA 2004, the prestigious biennial symposium of the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, and was performed on a boat travelling between in Helsinki, Finland, Marienham, Sweden, and Tallinn, Estonia, with satellite internet connection to online participants (which worked intermittently—it was cloudy!).
The interaction with Sea.nce was user-tested throughout its development, evaluated both according to Human–Computer Interaction guidelines, where it was appropriate, and artistically, where it is not (for example, creators of art systems have to distinguish between frustration that arises from bad design choices and frustration that comes from a system that is designed not to be controllable). Our testing consisted of several informal group tests of specific functions and one semi-formal test/rehearsal, in which seven participants (in Sydney) plus the two artists (in Paris) tried out the full range of functionality under observation (filming and event-logging), and gave interview feedback about the experience.
Our 2004 paper Uncanny Interaction: A Digital Medium for Networked E.motion described the development of the project, and was published in the proceedings of Interaction: Systems, Practice and Theory, Creativity and Cognition Studios Press, Sydney, Australia.
Other Things
Unfortunately, not all my work can easily be shown online. This section describes some of those projects.
ss Great Britain Conservation Database
The ss Great Britain is an historic iron ship, located in a dry dock in Bristol, England. As part of her conservation in 2004–2007, it was necessary to document the condition of every part of her hull, prior to treatment, as part of the conservation record. I developed a paper forms-based system for Eura Conservation’s conservators to easily and reliably make observations on-site and to associate those notes with particlar locations on the ship, and with digital photographs. The forms could then be used to enter the data into a database in a format that was consistent and searchable.
Tutoritool
I recorded sound samples and engineered the ‘unskippable’ tracks for the original Tutoritool, which was the world’s first interactive turntablism tutorial record. Developed by Pedestrian and inspired by the need for DJs and musicians to gain a better understanding of turntablism, the double vinyl package contains two sides of lessons, exemplifying the most popular scratch techniques and then applying these to the task of composition. The DJ can practice alongside recorded examples to improve technique, or become a turntable musician by accompanying the virtual turntable band.
The original Tutoritool sold all 1000 copies after rave reviews, and a sequel is due to launch in June 2007. See tutoritool.com for details.
Cognitive Cockpit
For a time in 1999, I was a Flight Simulation Technician in a project called “The Cognitive Cockpit”. The aim of the project was to investigate how to present new information to a pilot who is already cognitively loaded in various sensory modes. For example, if a pilot is communicating over radio and manoeuvring, new information might be presented in the helmet-mounted display, rather than aurally, or on another screen. The technological approach was to use bio-sensors to gauge the pilot’s cognitive load, interaction sensors to tell which instruments the pilot was engaging with, and an AI model to predict the likely importance of various pieces of information and to progressively automate low-importance tasks. My role was to develop the flight simulator in which various scenarios were tried with this technology.