Department Member, Faculty of Art and Design
Design History and Theory
Thesis Title: This is not here: Connectedness, Remote Experience and Immersive Telematic Art
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Professor Simon Biggs
Dr. Chris Roast Professor Chris Rust Professor Mike Press |
About
I'm a designer and researcher working with digital media. I like making things, thinking about things, how we do them and what they mean to us.
I am interested in how technology changes us, while we think we are doing something with technology. My work is about consciousness, perception and experiences of presence and inter-connectedness among physically remote people. (Essentially they are about understanding the requirements necessary to create deep experiences of global awareness and inter-connectedness through sensual data-visualisation technologies that connect us with other people and our planet in radically new and imaginative ways.)
In 02007 I completed an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Fine Arts and Computer Sciences at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Prior to that I studied Visual Communication & Digital Media Design at the University of the Arts Berlin. (In between I spent a semester at KISD, the Cologne International School of Design.) My research interests began in another life with a very traditional 3-year apprenticeship as a graphic designer/typographer in Ulm, Germany.
In my research i position my own work within an interdisciplinary framework of case studies, theoretical perspectives and conceptual approaches from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Art History and Media Arts. Here I look at how, for example, telematic experiences, which encompass a wide range of applications from Telepresence to Virtual Reality, are described. For one, I use visual methods such as charts and diagrams to categorise these into Telematic Art, Transformation Art and Global Awareness Art, pointing out their intrinsic experiential qualities. For example to create global awareness experiences not only as a 'cognitive' experience but through a physical and embodied engagement, a memorable bodily experience.
I also use research methods such as Grounded Theory, adopted from the social sciences, to conduct and evaluate interviews with participants in order to gain a deeper understanding of how people experience interaction with digital media and make sense of the experience. This can lead to crucial insights, among these, how to 'improve' the design in its next iteration to achieve particular desired experiential properties.
Through my research I learned some facts that never stop to intrigue me:
1. We get used to new technologies incredibly fast (and this 'adaptation' is part of what we call 'learning'.)
2. Perceiving is an active process. Most of the time we don't perceive actively. In fact most of the time our brain makes most of what we perceive up.
3. We actively construct our own 'reality'.
4. “The world which we see, is not the world, but a world, which we bring forth with others.” (Maturana, Varela) Its a worldview (Weltanschauung), its viral and the metaphorical water we swim in. Usually we are not aware of it.
5. In the end its all about how people make sense of the world. Design semantics, participatory methods and autopoiesis. And we all are learners as we try to make sense of how people make sense.
Presently I am investigating the link between 'calm technologies' and 'presence indication' in the digital-social sphere from a designerly perspective. How can we indicate the connectedness of remote parties in sensual and vivid ways more experiential then graphs, charts and diagrams? My current research explores subtle sides of 'non-visual multi-modal visualisation' in sonifying the IP address of visitors to the website with a physical display.
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