On the third application my latest proposal has 'won' Design Star funding. It has been interesting to reflect on the evolution of my proposal and research has taken in just a year and a half. Needless to say I'm very happy that perseverance has paid of an look forward to joining the cohort for my final three years. For those that are interested the abstract and introduction are below. For more on my research take a look at the projects Becoming Tortoise and Enactive Interactions and Performer Training Without a Tutor on this site.
Locating Stories: Designing participatory, locative and embodied experiences with people, objects and sounds.
This practice-based PhD explores how simple and repeatable interactions with sounds, objects, stories and technology can be used in the design of playful enactive spaces to enhance locative audio storytelling and build emotional and embodied connections with others in a variety of public platforms. Locative audio storytelling usually refers to the creation and reception of experiences such as museum tours or urban soundwalks in which people can make and listen to content site-specifically, usually through headphones connected to a portable device. In these contexts, location refers to the geographical position of the user mediated through tools and technology that are designed to locate absolutely (GPS coordinates) or relatively (distance between receiver and transmitter). What if instead, audio could be located in more embodied ways, with or within specific actions or gestures? How might physical actions of stepping towards or turning around be responded to with audio? How could physical, spatial and rhythmical bodily interactions change the design, content and experience of locative audio storytelling?
Background
Located audio has an increasingly significant role in the mediation of users and public spaces at a time when the relationship between space and public art is changing. Public engagement, of which active participation is an element, is a core requirement for the Arts Council’s Grants for the Arts scheme (Arts Council, 2016). Sir Peter Bazalgette, former chairman of the Arts Council uses the term ‘empathetic citizens’ to express art and cultures importance in telling human stories that allow us to experience life in anothers shoes (Bazalgette, 2015). New commissioning agencies are appearing, such as ArtAngel who specialise in experimental art in public spaces, reflecting the increasingly conspicuous ‘social turn’ in art in the public realm (Bishop, 2006). Design contributes to this change through participatory projects which have been described as the most significant, contemporary synthesis in art and design due to their durational, experiential, and dialogic characteristics (Holt, 2015). Locative audio contributes to this shift in paradigm. Currently, we can find locative audio used as a mediator between object and audience within museums and art galleries (Gherab-Martin & Kalantzis-Cope, 2011), art projects (Miller, 2003) and curated audio tours (Detour, 2017) which redefine where users can interact with works of art by providing opportunities to present audio content site-specifically away from the museum (Butler & Miller, 2005). Locative audio also democratises the art-making process. Individuals are increasingly active producers of digital content and the rise in user-generated soundwalks from online platforms, such as Echoes (Echoes, 2017), reflect this trend. In these examples location can be a stage, a plot device, or an inspiration but fundamentally it is a set of geographical coordinates on a map, mediated through digital technologies which provide access to audio content. I argue that this approach limits the use and potential of locative audio storytelling, which this research aims to expand.
From a post-structuralist perspective of space in human geography, location is more than geographical; it is a crucial player in the complex process of embodiment (Thrift, 2003). It is a form of social production (Lefebvre, 1992) that contains rhythms and pulses with ‘intersecting trajectories and temporalities’ (Edensor, 2012: p7). How could this embodied view of space inform how stories are contained not simply at but within an environment? The field of Human Machine Interaction (HMI) draws on the notion of enactive spaces, ‘where understanding of a technology system is based on multisensory input and motor responses resulting from active forms of engagement’ (Tanaka, 2012: p1). For Tanaka, an enactive space allows participants and environments to interact through wearable technology. Recognising that space is a complex, socially produced and technologically enhanced reality, my research investigates the use of enactive spaces to design new embodied approaches to locative audio storytelling.
Theoretically and methodologically, this research draws on and contributes to a contemporary view of design thinking that de-centralises the role of the designer as the main agent in design. Kimbell puts forward an approach to design as a situated, contingent set of practices that acknowledges the involvement of diverse and multiple actors (Kimbell, 2012). As the design of interactive systems become more complex, experience prototyping methods are evolving. Experience is a dynamic, complex and subjective phenomenon and a number of contemporary techniques such as ‘sensuous speculation’, ‘narrative objects’, ‘applied improvisation’ (Rozendaal et al., 2016) and ‘embodied storming’ (Schleicher et al., 2010) have been developed as a way to understand and experience the qualities of an interaction subjectively. Embodied participation engages a different level of empathy as the participants learning through their own bodies (Schleicher et al., 2010). Empathy is a particularly important trait for a designer and a core value of design (Simonsen et al, 2010) (Mootee, 2013) as well as participatory experiences (Farman, 2015).
My practice research investigates playful ways in which ‘location’ can be rendered, embodied and interactive. Building on an inclusive interpretation of what constitutes a story, and working not only with narrative content but also other types of stories such as instructions, children’s books, sounds-as-graffiti, story-telling-objects, I look to build environments in which these can be translated into audio material to be experienced by users in physically engaged, spatially interactive ways. In Enactive Interactions andPerformer Training without a Tutor, my research has so far involved worked with a performer to translate performer training texts, instructions of exercises, into enactive spaces.
My research has also discovered a complex relationship between the agency of embodied prototyping and its mediating effect on the experiences found in rendered output (installations and workshops) particularly when enactive spaces are created through a co-collaboration between participants. Empathy has been expressed as reoccurring theme in feedback, not only between the participant and characters within the stories but also between participants. I am also beginning to consider the agency of power and control (Hendy, 2013) as the interplay of sounds, people, spaces and objects is observed, as well as how tacit knowledge can be shared through these bodily experiences. Finally, and considering the unique characteristics of locative and embodied storytelling, my research raises the question of responsibility, our emotional identification and our connectedness as a society.
As such this research seeks to address the following research questions:
1. Theoretically, what challenges and possibilities does locative audio storytelling present to current articulations of public space?
2. Methodologically, what new ways of working can be found in a cross-disciplinary collaboration with embodied practitioners, particularly in developing speculative and embodied experience prototyping methods?
3. How can locative audio storytelling contribute to the development of a situated, embodied, material and empathetic design practice?