Section: New Results

Creativity

Participants : Sarah Fdili Alaoui [correspondant] , Marianela Ciolfi Felice, Carla Griggio, Shu Yuan Hsueh, Ghita Jalal, Germán Leiva, John Maccallum, Wendy Mackay, Nolwenn Maudet, Joanna Mcgrenere, Midas Nouwens, Jean-Philippe Riviere, Nicolas Taffin, Philip Tchernavskij, Theophanis Tsandilas, Andrew Webb, Michael Wessely.

ExSitu is interested in understanding the work practices of creative professionals, particularly artists, designers, and scientists, who push the limits of interactive technology. Nolwenn Maudet, under the supervision of Wendy Mackay and Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, successfully defended her thesis, Designing Design Tools  [40], on this topic. Her research includes observational studies of graphic designers and developers ( [24] described in the Collaboration section below), as well as the creation of variety of creativity support tools to support professional designers [23] (described in the Fundamentals of Interaction section above).

We designed and evaluated computational models of movement’s expressive qualities as defined in the framework of Laban Efforts [13] for dancer and movement practitioners. We included experts in Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) in our design process, in order to select a set of suitable multimodal sensors as well as to compute features that closely correlate to the definitions of Efforts in LMA. Evaluation of our model showed that multimodal data combining positional, dynamic and physiological information allows for a better characterization of Laban Efforts. Inspired by movement practices and dance, we designed an interactive sound installation that supports kinesthetic awareness of a participant’s micro-movements [17] and discussed perspectives of such an installation from somatic practices and embodied cognition [16]. We discussed [25] the ethical and aesthetic implications of the appropriation of biomedical sensors in artistic practices, in particular dance. We also traced the history and new perspective of HCI in Dance and body based practices [11].

In collaboration with Inria Lille, we developed a versioning and annotation system for supporting collaborative, iterative design of mapping layers for digital musical instruments (DMIs) [31]. We also collaborated with Saarland University, TU Berlin and MIT to digitally fabricate Directional screens, devices and surfaces that maximize perceived image quality (e.g., resolution, brightness, and color reproduction) for large audiences [27]. Finally, Michael Wessely participated in the MIT Summer School for Computational Fabrication and Smart Matter and was then invited by its organizers to co-author an article [35] that presents and discusses the results of the summer school.