He developed and administers runme.org, an online repository for software art, which has given rise to works like dot_matrix_synth, where a dot matrix printer is reprogrammed to play music while it prints its own notations in patterns as it is performed. He forms part of slub, a trio of coders who develop their own software for the creation and performance of process-based improvisations and live generative music. In the same vein, he is also a member of TOPLAP, a group of highly improvisatory programmers who write software while it is being executed to generate music and live visuals during a performance.

Yee-King has many years as a composer and producer of electronic music behind him, and continues to perform and release records. An expert user and teacher of SuperCollider (a programming language for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition), he also contributes to the Linux open source community.

In 2005 he started Generator.x as a curatorial platform for generative art and design which has since resulted in a conference, a blog, a travelling exhibition and concert tour. Watz practices out of New York City and Oslo, where he is a lecturer at the Oslo School of Architecture and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Toni Robertson established the Interaction Design and Work Practice Lab at the University of Technology, Sydney, in 2002. Robertson’s interest in technology design was born out of her earlier career as an artist, printmaker and graphic designer. Today her research interests include understanding how actual work practices can be developed and then used to design information systems that appropriately service their situation of use, and exploring how different metaphors for human cognition and work can affect the design of technology.

Robertson is presently chief investigator in an Australian Research Council funded project that is seeking to establish an empirical framework for designing usable and useful wireless mobile computing applications. Based on the premise that the technological challenges presented in the development of mobile computing devices have overshadowed attention to issues of use and usability that ultimately determine technologies’ success in real environments, the project aims to shape the findings of its ethnographic studies into a reliable conceptual framework that will increase the successful utilization of mobile technology by Australian industries.

Under Robertson’s directorship the Interaction Design and Work Practice Lab is currently committed to two other main projects. The Bystander Field aims to stimulate unprecedented understanding of narrative and affective patterns in our past through investigating new systems for interactive and immersive display of contentious stories found in imagery from heritage collections.  Understanding Quality of Experience in Experience Enrich (Next Generation) aims to provide an approximation of what the phrase ‘quality of experience’ could imply for future networked environments, and how its criteria could be utilised to assist with the beneficial design of network related technology, as well facilitate a decrease of the risks in developing inappropriate products and services.

]]> http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/institutions/interaction-design-and-work-practice-laboratory/feed 0 -33.883785 151.201025-33.883785151.201025 http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/people/kristina-hook http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/people/kristina-hook#comments Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:10:12 +0000 Xavier http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/?p=168 Kristina Höök is the lab manager of the interaction lab at SICS. She also upholds a position as Professor in Human-Machine Interaction at Department of Computer and Systems Sciences that belongs both to Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology (KTH).

The first, and perhaps most known, concept I worked with, we named social navigation. Bascially, social navigation makes other’s social trails through information spaces visible. This helps users find their way in large information spaces as we typically rely on the judgement of others. After working with the concept of social navigation for a while, some of the colleagues I was working with at the time, figured that we could move this concept out into mobile contexts. Thus, we built a range of social mobile services . This in turn, made us discover the problematic nature of seamlessness, a concept often promoted by the telecom-industry. Instead of seamlessness, we have therefore been working with seamfulness. A seamful design is one where the seams in the network coverage, positioning system, or between different media in a space are not hidden but instead used as a resource in the design, shown to the users so that they can make sense of them, appropriate them and have fun with them.

After working with social navigation for many years, I became really interested in affective computing after listening to Rosalind Picard in 1998. But my take on affective computing is somewhat different from Roz’ direction of research. Together with the affective presence group I have been exploring an alternative view on how affect can be integrated into interaction with end users. Our take is that of affective interaction. In particular, with my research group we have been exploring the idea of involving users both physically and cognitively in what we name an affective loop.

All these “interaction concepts” that I have been working with throughout my research career all belong to the same theoretical foundation: that of embodied interaction (as discussed by Paul Dourish). But instead of being grand theories of life, universe and everything, our aim is to make these concepts carry the grand theory into usable design concepts that anyone can pick up and make use of in their design practice.”