Humanities and Arts Research Agenda brings together HCI Enthusiasts

The "HCI, the Arts and the Humanities" workshop in York last month brought together researchers exploring new approaches inspired by the arts and humanities, to identify areas of common interest. Organised by Peter Wright of the University of York, Janet Finlay of Leeds Metropolitan University, and Ann Light of the University of Sussex and Usability News, it drew a varied group of academics with the intention of pooling ideas and resources to start a new research community.

'The aim is to explore techniques and concepts from other disciplines with a view to analysing the role and meaning of interaction with digital technologies. In this way we hope to situate the purely functional construal of human interaction that has supplied models for our understanding of interaction design in the past,' said Wright.

The digital world has crept out of the workspace and into our homes, our networks and our journeys between places, argue the organisers, and the new tendency to talk of designing for 'experience' as well as 'performance' reflects this shift towards immersive and ubiquitous computing, but our analysis and evaluation approaches have not kept pace.

Some 25 people started the day by defining their interests and mapping the territory; this was followed by small group discussions to identify areas where research was being undertaken or might profitably be encouraged. From these sessions, three topics emerged as foci for discussion: audience, meaning and engagement.

Experience in those attending ranged from humanities-based first degrees, to work in theatre, journalism, music and art and architecture, but most participants were now focussed on aspects of HCI and digital design. Interests ranged from semiotics to genre, from textual analysis to ethnography and ethnomethodology, from design patterns to critical theory, and from designing seduction to describing experience. Discussion raged about interactive games, granularity of content and artificial intelligence in one part of the room; in another, the need to extend conceptions of 'user' to the broader categories of 'audience' and 'actor'.

A tension developed between the researchers that, by nature, resist reduction and categorisation and those that like to pin everything down – seemingly a classic art/science split, though the instinct to broaden or narrow the debate could be found in people with backgrounds on both sides of the divide. But challenges of this sort were fruitful. After working through the outcomes of the morning's discussions, the end of the day was dedicated to turning ideas into action. Enthusiasm was high and the idea of a manifesto was suggested which has since begun to materialise, led by John Knight of User-Lab at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. (See below for an excerpt.)

Additionally, a conference is being planned to bring arts and HCI together, with installations, papers and workshops, probably in the Aegean in 2005. Meanwhile, another workshop – this time at CHI2004 in Vienna – is being discussed to follow those at CHI2002, HCI2002 and the one that has just taken place.

If you are interested in sharing ideas in this field, contributing to or helping to organise future activities, please sign up for the discussion list at lit-hci@smartgroups.com .

Excerpt from early discussions of a manifesto:
· A future of enriched interaction and New Media
· A pollination between HCI and the arts and humanities
· We turn to the workplace, the home, to the everyday, the prosaic experience and to design

New cultural forms of interaction:
· We design interaction that does justice to the richness of people
· We score the narrative structures of interaction
· We wonder if applications can be both immersive and interactive?
· We ponder whether the quality of presence within role-playing multi-player games is important?
· Employing devices, our story unfolds and we notice interactive patterns of: intention, guidance, response, parallel narrative, multimodal, topographic, algorithmic narrative about him or herself
· We have philosophy, literary studies, anthropology, literary, with meanings, social significance and strangeness to design a richer cultural artefact

Success indicators of experience design:
· We invent unparalleled experiences around the computer system as engaging as lived experience
· We understand experience as multifaced: with joyful, difficult, challenging, rich, vital, and zestful qualities
· Our analysis is not a reduction of the experience to the components, nor the sum of its parts.
· We see experience as the lively integration of means and ends with meaning and expressiveness revealed to users
· We identify experience and engagement factors and frameworks
· Our media approach requires participation, viewers, readers and listeners
· We think that the temporal aspects plus spatial control gives new media its unique qualities.

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