iLRN 2024

I’m looking forward to giving a keynote at the 10th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network in Glasgow in June.

MobileHCI 2023 – Colliding with robots

As robots populate our homes so we must learn to collide with them – and them with us. Not only are collisions inevitable, but they can also be pleasurable – in sports and rough and tumble play. We might even consider that humans have a moral right to collide with robots or risk being boxed in by a plethora of collision adverse mobile devices. I will explore collision as an essential facet of human bodily experience that needs be brought to mobile HCI. I will draw on examples of collisions with delivery, telepresence and assistive robots, and designing a robot to play with cats, to reveal the human, technological and ethical challenges of colliding with robots.

Audio Mostly 2023 – Glitching the Body

Musicians often seek out the glitches in music technologies as a source of inspiration, innovation and improvisation. They also often talk of their bodies as if they were instruments. A focus on bodily interaction with digital technologies during embodied musicking leads me to consider how musicians might glitch their own bodies. I will reflect on a series of artist-led projects that pushed the boundaries of embodied interaction to reveal strategies for glitching the body such as sensory misalignment, surrendering control and uncomfortable interactions. I will consider how emerging methods such as soma design enable us to defamiliarisie bodily experience and help design technologies that reveal the musical glitches in our own bodies.

Boston CHI 2021 – Uncomfortable Interactions

KTH Digital Futures 2021 – Singing in Chorus

Hello Culture 2017 – Playing With Control

Playing with Control. I will draw on recent examples of interactive performances that have emerged from research at the Mixed Reality Lab – potentially including breath-controlled rides, brain-controlled films and interactive music compositions – to explore that nature of control of interactive and embodied experiences. As an interaction designer, my immediate concern is understanding the nature of control: to what extent is it voluntary? To what extent are people self-aware of control? And how is the tightness-looseness of control negotiated with the system? However, I hope that these ideas will stimulate a wider discussion with the audience about emerging forms of interactive, embodied and multi-sensory experience.

HCI Korea 2016 – Designing with Discomfort

The traditional tenets of HCI are grounded in making the user’s interactions with computers as comfortable – efficient, ergonomic, satisfying, legible and predictable – as possible. However, as HCI increasingly turns its attention to cultural uses of computing, from highbrow arts to mainstream entertainment, so the game is changing. Our experience of artworks is often far from comfortable. Our engagements with games and sports may push our minds and bodies to the limit. I will therefor set out an argument for deliberately and systematically designing with discomfort in order to deliver powerful cultural experiences. I will identify the potential benefits of uncomfortable interactions under the general headings of entertainment, enlightenment and sociality. I will review a series of artworks and performances that have deliberately employed discomfort to create unusually powerful and provocative interactive experiences. By reflecting on these and other examples, I will articulate a suite of tactics for engineering four primary forms of discomfort in interactive experiences – visceral, cultural, control and intimacy. I will reveal how moments of discomfort need to be embedded into an overall experience which ultimately resolves them, requiring a further consideration of the dramatic acts of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement. Finally, I will consider an ethical framework for designing uncomfortable interactions, revisiting key ethical issues such as consent, withdrawal, privacy and risk.