Performative Experience Design, alt.chi 2013
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Talk to explain my alt.chi paper, 'Performative Experience Design' (Spence, J., Frohlich, D.M. and Andrews, S. Performative experience design. In CHI EA '13, ACM Press (2013), 2049-2058.). Copyright-protected images removed.
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Performative Experience Design, alt.chi 2013
- 1. Jocelyn Spence, David M. Frohlich, Stuart Andrews Digital World Research Centre School of Arts University of Surrey Tuesday 30 April 2013 Performative Experience Design
- 2. Outline • What is performance? • Taxonomy of existing approaches • Why should HCI care? • Performative Experience Design • Conclusion
- 3. What is performance? Schechner, Richard. 1988. Performance Theory. Routledge. p. xvi.
- 5. Taxonomy: Portrayal Portrayal Enactment Staging Engagement Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceDesigners User System Communicating narrative Envisionment Embodiment Social constructs Collaboration, movement Public setting Engagement of different roles with interactive system System/ device System/ device Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceUsers Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie ncePerformers Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceSpectators Category Constituents Key focus Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceUsers Spence, J., Frohlich, D.M. and Andrews, S. Performative experience design. In CHI EA '13, ACM Press (2013), 2049-2058.
- 6. Forum Theatre Newell et al (2006) Fig. 1 Example stills from one of the fall detector videos. In Newell et al (2006) p. 1005.
- 7. Taxonomy: Enactment Portrayal Enactment Staging Engagement Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceDesigners User System Communicating narrative Envisionment Embodiment Social constructs Collaboration, movement Public setting Engagement of different roles with interactive system System/ device System/ device Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceUsers Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie ncePerformers Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceSpectators Category Constituents Key focus Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceUsers
- 8. SpiderCrab Wallis, Popat & McKinney (2009) Figure 2 SpiderCrab prototype limb and dancer with armband (Photo: Emergent Objects), in Wallis, Popat & McKinney (2009) p 104.
- 9. Taxonomy: Staging Portrayal Enactment Staging Engagement Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceDesigners User System Communicating narrative Envisionment Embodiment Social constructs Collaboration, movement Public setting Engagement of different roles with interactive system System/ device System/ device Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceUsers Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie ncePerformers Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceSpectators Category Constituents Key focus Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceUsers
- 10. Collaborative “embodied programming” Fernaeus & Tholander (2006) Fig. 3. A role-play activity around a tangible lego robot. In Fernaeus & Tholander (2006) p. 1022.
- 11. Taxonomy: Engagement Portrayal Enactment Staging Engagement Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceDesigners User System Communicating narrative Envisionment Embodiment Social constructs Collaboration, movement Public setting Engagement of different roles with interactive system System/ device System/ device Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceUsers Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie ncePerformers Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceSpectators Category Constituents Key focus Audie nce Audie nce Audie nce Audie nceUsers
- 12. You Get Me (2008), Blast Theory Image © Blast Theory, http://www.flickr.com/photos/blasttheory/8473204229/sizes/l/in/photostream/
- 13. Performative Experience Design Interactive systems designed to create: • Shifting roles • Risky, challenging, constructive experiences • Space for negotiating identity
- 14. Performative Experience Design • Integrating the digital into the performed self • Integrating the digital into emergence • Creating potentially transformative experiences
- 15. Performance traditions: non-representational performance • Presentational performance (De Marinis 1993) • Autobiographical performance (Heddon 2008) • Performance art (Goldberg 1988) • Postdramatic theatre (Lehmann 2006)
- 16. Theoretical concepts • Re-imagining relationships between users in various roles and digital media technologies • “Heightened attention” (Fischer-Lichte, 2008) • “Performativity” as emergence of behaviours and identities in moment of interaction • Aesthetic (Fischer-Lichte, 2008; Salter 2010)
- 17. Contributions • Pushing the boundaries of HCI • Strengthening design-oriented research
- 19. Conclusion • What is performance? • Taxonomy of existing approaches • Why should HCI care? • Performative Experience Design • Conclusion
Editor's Notes
- I’m just going to hit the high points here. I’m going to sketch out the problem – which is understanding what performance is – and then describe the taxonomy we created of existing uses of performance in the HCI literature. From there I’ll explain the direction that we’re taking in our use of performance in HCI, which we’re calling Performative Experience Design. You might be thinking right now that I’ve missed a trick – that if I’m talking about performance, I should be wearing some sort of costume, and acting out my points with dialogue or music or mime. It’s not missing a trick – it’s actually my main point. Let me explain.
- This is one longstanding and respected sketch of what performance is. Don’t worry about reading it in detail, but I can tell you that only one-third of those points refer to theatre. Plus any behaviour can be studied as performance. So the question becomes,
- What isn’t performance? In HCI you have people with more or less thorough grounding in lots of performance traditions and not a lot of space to articulate the history and the implications of each of those traditions. So the HCI research that engages with performance can end up appearing to be muddled or contradictory, depending on what you think performance means. CLICK. Some people think immediately of plays – drama – the narrative of a story that’s unfolding. Others think more of the mimesis – faking – play-acting – that the actors do. Others think in terms of dramaturgical sociology and think of performance as the opposite of faking – it’s the way we all present ourselves in our everyday lives. Others think more of dance, movement, embodiment. What we did was to look at HCI research that draws on performance and categorise what we found based on how they framed the relationship between the user and the interactive system. The research we did for this taxonomy was fairly thorough, but not by any means exhaustive – or else we would have had ten pages of references and no text at all! So let me give you a sketch of a sketch.
- Here is the taxonomy. The first category is portrayal. In portrayal, you’re using techniques from theatre to communicate ideas from one group of people to another. This is essentially knowledge transfer, not focusing on the interaction with the system.
- It has proved to be valuable for some researchers, and there’s still a little work in this area, but there doesn’t seem to be much room for development.
- The second category is enactment. In enactment, we see research that uses elements of performance theory and practice to look beyond the cognitive, beyond knowledge transfer. They look at embodiment – what performance can tell us about physical interactions with technology.
- So here we have people interacting with a gigantic robot by dancing with it. Performance studies can help understand interactions like these, and I’m sure there’s plenty of room for further research here.
- The third category is staging. In staging, we have performance theory and practice being used to look at how multiple users interact and collaborate, particularly in public.
- So for example here you have performance theory being used to help develop “embodied programming”. These are groups of children working collaboratively with a tangible programming system. There’s also certainly room for more research in this vein.
- The last category is engagement. In engagement, the research draws on performance theory and practice to investigate interactions not just with multiple users, but users in multiple roles. You have the people directly interacting with the technology, and those observing this interaction. There are varying shades of grey in between the two, and flickering as individuals switch roles. And then there are the people orchestrating the interaction. We feel this is the richest area for further research because it is making fuller use of the performance literature to look at much more intricate set of user behaviours.
- Blast Theory is the obvious example here, theorised by Benford and Giannachi as Mixed Reality Performance, and there are several others working in this vein. This is all well and good, but so far I’m just describing what’s out there. But this leaves the larger question. Why should we care about performance in HCI?
- I think we should care because all of this cross-fertilisation leads to a sub-discipline that we’re calling Performative Experience Design. Performative Experience Design is rooted in this ‘engagement’ category along with Mixed Reality Performance. It is the setting of technological and social parameters to create opportunities for experiences with interactive technologies, with multiple and shifting roles for users to take. But it also moves people out of their everyday, conversational comfort zone and into the risky space of putting themselves on display – and that means negotiating an identity that they shape to each unique performance event.
- When you do this with digital media, you get the opposite effect of reproducing and disseminating static media artefacts around the globe – you get the integration of digital media into the performer’s sense of self and of how they are perceived by others in one particular time, space, and context. The goal is for these designs to lead to intersubjective and performative encounters and potentially transformative experiences.
- Performative Experience Design moves away from the early uses of performance in HCI, like Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre, which is all about theatre as drama and narrative. Gradually, some of the HCI research has been moving away from drama and narrative, towards non-representational performance. This is essentially performance in which the performer interacts with the audience without taking on a completely fictional role or acting out a naturalistic scene. This is a broad category that includes ‘presentational performance’, autobiographical performance, some performance art, and some postdramatic theatre.
- To accomplish its goals, Performative Experience Design uses a number of strategies based on theoretical concepts in the performance literature. The primary ones are: re-imagining relationships beyond the ‘user’, a heightened attention to the present moment of the experience (EFL, Salter), parameters for emergent, performative behaviours that can reflect or constitute a sense of self, and design according to the aesthetic of the event, for experiences that are memorable, formative, and possibly transformative.
- Performative Experience Design contributes to HCI in at least a couple of ways. From a broader point of view, it gives us a way to continue the development of HCI through its various waves – from cognition, to situation and context, to felt experience, enchantment, affect, to the aesthetic, specifically the aesthetics of the event. And from a somewhat narrower perspective, performance gives us another foothold in interaction design, experience design, and design-oriented research (Fällman 2003), because it’s a whole discipline based on the modes of knowledge that come from doing rather than saying.
- To instantiate these ideas, we have created Collect Yourselves! Collect Yourselves! is a browser-based application in three stages. First, it prompts people to engage with their personal digital media archives in particular ways drawn from media sharing research and performance theory and practice. Second, it brings people together in one physical time and place to create a performance made up of the stories around their photos. These autobiographical performances are contextualised to one time, place, and audience. The third stage will allow people to remix and share each other’s media and the digital traces of their performance. Early trials with this system show that there’s something valuable going on in the transition from regular conversation to digitally augmented autobiographical performance.
- Now I’ve mapped out performance as it’s been used so far in HCI, and where we’re using performance to drive research into media sharing. I hope you can see why, frighteningly, a PowerPoint suits this presentation better than a funny costume and acting through dialogue. [[[STEP OUT]]] This is me, Jocelyn Spence, constructing an identity for you, in this room, on this day, using media technologies. This is performance. [[[NEXT SLIDE, THEN]]] Thank you.