Photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/videojackstudios/sets/72157605816470322
Event: Create 2008Place: London, UK, British Computer Society
Dates: 24-25/6/2008
1. General information
Some excerpts from the website
http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/idc/create2008/:
CREATE 2008 is a 2-day conference about creating innovative interactions, whether digital consumer products, interactive services or interaction paradigms. A conference where the emphasis is on sharing the wealth of creative ideas we have developed to resolve problems, to create new capabilities, or new functions; where the aim is to spawn further creative designs that can make a difference to people. In keeping with this theme, we invite people to bring:
* Your experiences – designs, both successes and failures, that have pushed the boundaries of interaction
* Your approaches – principles and methods that have delivered new, people-centred ideas and products.
This year’s theme is “embedding people-centred design in the process of innovation”. How do we work together as designers and HCI specialists to come up with people-centred design, and how do we work with others to make our designs a reality?
Also, CREATE 2008 will feature the CREATE design showcase – a forum for people to exhibit and discuss their latest ideas.
CREATE is jointly organised by the Human-Computer Interaction Specialist Group of the Ergonomics Society, and British Computing Society’s Interaction Specialist Group, and will be held at the British Computer Society conference venue in Covent Garden, London, on 24-25 June, 2008.
CREATE Design Showcase
This event will feature a number of selected exhibits of innovative interactive design projects from academia and industry, so come along to meet the designers and talk to them and the other delegates about innovative interactions.
2. Participation in the Create 2008 design showcase
My project “AVOL: Audio-Visual OnLine” was one of the 10 projects selected for the CREATE Design Showcase.
AVOL is a Video Jack project. Video Jack is a collaboration between Nuno Correia (interaction design, music, programming) and André Carrilho (graphic design and animation). AVOL is also part of Nuno Correia’s ongoing research at University of Art and Design Helsinki, and will be one of the projects included in his dissertation “Interactive Audio-Visual Objects”.
The project was shown in one of the two showcase rooms. The audience could interact with AVOL, and a large number of participants tried it. Being present at the showcase allowed me to gather feedback from a wide range of participants, from students to academia and industry representatives (such as BBC R&D and Google).
The response was quite positive, and a number of suggestions for future developments were given to me. Therefore, the participation on this event was important for my research.
AVOL (Audio-Visual OnLine) is an audio-visual project that allows the combination of virtual objects to create an integrated sound and image experience. It also aims to explore new ways to access and interact with music.
It was commissioned by DGARTES (a division of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture), and is part of their new Net.Art portal, since December 2007.
The discovery is an important element of the AVOL experience. The black starting screen and the atypical GUI (“graphical user interface”) invite exploration.
The user can manipulate 7 objects, that correspond to 7 different types of sound. For each object, there are 4 sound and image options. Therefore, there are 28 different modules, and numerous possibilities of combination.
Each object has controls to turn on, off and isolate elements. The objects can be moved by dragging or random movement. As they move, the objects may collide, which originates a specific combination of sound and image. There are also controls to increase and diminish the volume, and consequently the size, of each object.
The name AVOL is a reference and tribute to the album EVOL by Sonic Youth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EVOL) and the project FMOL by Sergi Jordà (http://www.iua.upf.es/~sergi/FMOL/). Their influence was important for the origin of the project.
List of projects participating in the Design Showcase:
- Parasite
- A 3D online virtual environment to improve access to a museum as both a learning and information resource
- DJ Darwin
- “Image Channel” in Panoramic Video: a method to improve presence in virtual environments
- Middlesex Older Drivers and Advanced
- Technology Project (MODAT)
- Jive – social networking for your gran
- Companions
- Fragments of place
- AVOL (Audio-Visual OnLine)
- ‘Everysense’ – interactive control system for multi sensory learning and therapy
3. Attendence of Create 2008 conference
Besides participating in the design showcase, I also attended the conference.
Some of the presentations were very relevant for my research, namely the following:
- Lost in music: When should a phone not be a phone (Benedict Davies, Google);
- Experiencing the future: Rapid experiential prototyping (Gary Davis, Davis Associates);
- Capturing the User Experience (Linda Hole, Bournemouth University);
- Evaluation of multimodal interaction design tool (Sarah Sharples, University of Notingham);
- Mass participation and ubiquitous technology (Nicola Smyth, BBC);
- Integrating people-centred design and innovation processes (Lucy Stockbridge and Anna Haywood, Serco).