The SiDE Project and Beyond - Open Lab, Newcastle University

Engagement at Culture Lab Newcastle: The SiDE Project and Beyond Lalya Gaye1, Andreia Cavaco1, Areti Galani2, Rachel Clarke1, Jamie Allen1, Atau Tanaka1 1

Culture Lab Newcastle Newcastle University, NE1 7RU UK

2

Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies Newcastle University, NE1 7RU

{lalya.gaye, andreia.cavaco, areti.galani, rachel.clarke, jamie.allen1, atau.takana}@ncl.ac.uk ABSTRACT Culture Lab is a multidisciplinary research centre part of Newcastle University, focused on culturally-embedded inquiry in art and technology. It hosts a number of research projects working with social inclusion and engagement such as the SiDE (Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy), part of the UK Digital Hub. In this paper, we describe a number of engagement projects taking place at Culture Lab, both within the SiDE project and beyond: projects dealing with social inclusion, creative interactions, and engagement with public space.

Categories and Subject Descriptors K.4.0 [Computers and Society]: General.

General Terms Human Factors

Keywords

opportunities for self-expression and creative engagement embedded in the real physical and social world, that working with this medium offers [1]. Engagement activities include creative workshops with young people in collaboration with local youth work organisations as well as youth-led participatory design of interactive prototypes. Besides SiDE, Culture Lab hosts a number of engagement projects involving creative practices, local communities, and everyday environments. This paper describes how these projects deal with social inclusion, creative interactions and engagement with public space.

2. SOCIAL INCLUSION As part of the SiDE project, several projects at Culture Lab have been dealing with issues of social inclusion and engagement with digital technologies as a means of bridging the digital divide. The two examples below developed participatory explorations of the digital medium and aimed to empower participants in taking control over their use of digital technologies.

Creative engagement, social inclusion, participation, public space

1. INTRODUCTION Culture Lab is a world-class research centre part of Newcastle University, focused on culturally-embedded inquiry in art and technology. It hosts a number of research projects working with social inclusion and engagement. One of them, the ‘Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy’ (SIDE) research hub [5] is a project funded by the UK Research Councils and part of the Digital Hub, which deploys developments in ICT for social benefit. Its goal is to actively explore the transformative potentials of new technologies for individuals and communities at risk of, or suffering from social exclusion. For this purpose, it addresses four fields where digital technologies may deliver major social benefits: Connected Home & Community; Accessibility; Inclusive Transport Services; and Creative Industries. Based at Culture Lab, the Creative Media Group represents the Creative Industries strand within the SiDE project and works specifically with creative arts practices and young people in methodologies of cocreation: exploring the creative potentials of the digital medium for marginalized youth; and the innovative and socially grounded

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2.1 Silver Web Sessions The Silver Web Sessions were a series of weekly workshops that aimed to explore with older people how internet and social media could improve their quality of life. They were delivered in collaboration with a local cultural organisation (Tyneside Cinema) during a period of 8 weeks. They consisted of open-ended sessions with groups of older people recruited from the cinema’s regular visitors. The content and format of the sessions was developed in a bottom-up manner, based on the participants’ needs, interests and curiosity.

2.2 Future Options Pack The Creative Media group at SiDE also collaborated with the Youth Advisory Board of the organisation Regional Youth Work Unit, on a project that the young people of the advisory board had initiated and that they were managing. Their project Future Options Pack (FOP) aimed to help other youth find their ways through educational options and open a dialogue on this subject with their parents, by providing them with an information pack in the form of a playful interactive game. We assisted them in implementing the game themselves in a participatory design process, with weekly meetings over two months. This process empowered the young people in keeping control over the project and in gaining digital skills to develop and maintain it. Throughout, the young people were actively involved in all aspects of the implementation: its ‘look & feel’, its programming, its structure and interaction design. We are putting in place a participatory evaluation process, before FOP is distributed widely.

3. CREATIVE INTERACTIONS Other forms of engagement inquired at Culture Lab are digitallyenabled creative processes, aiming to e.g. engage young people with their environment, their community and each other. These activities mainly take the form of creative production workshops.

3.1 Sundroids Sundroids is a series of one-day workshops for young people using simple robotics to create solar powered kinetic sculptures. It is a participatory art workshop informed by constructionist approaches to learning and teaching [2]. The workshop addresses concepts of sustainable energy, localised energy generation, natural systems, environmental, site-specific and kinetic art. These topics are designed to be open, self-navigated and questioned by participants through situated learning in a specific outdoor environment (a space organized by a sustainability co-operative), ambient media and discussion formats. Participants build autonomous, outdoor-kinetic art structures using small motors and solar panels.

3.2 Remix Your Instrument This workshop was a collaboration with Generator, a leading national agency for popular music that also holds Urban Music Training programmes for young people. The content and format of the workshop emerged in a bottom-up manner from discussions young people. Aimed for the instrument-playing UMT programme PLAY, its goals were to build on the young people's existing musical skills, while at the same time opening a new world of possibilities and musical innovation to them; and make a connection between urban electronic music and the physicality of instrument playing. The young people got to experiment with augmenting music instruments with sensors that modified the sounds that they produced. The technology used was open-source, easily programmable hardware and software packaged into simple and approachable modules, so the young people could quickly learn how to use them and even modify them themselves.

4. ENGAGEMENT WITH PUBLIC SPACE The final aspect of the engagement work using digital technologies taking place at Culture Lab is engagement with public space: physical uses of urban space as creative resources and adaptation of digital technologies to contexts of public uses of space.

4.1 Remix Your ‘Hood Another collaboration with Generator, within their training programme for DJing and music production, this workshop is centred on the creative use of mobile phones and MP3 players; technologies that many young people are fairly familiar with and enjoy using. These workshops make use of RJDJ [4], an off-theshelf free reactive music application that remixes ambient sounds into music in real time. This enables one to see their own environment with new eyes, engage with it, and be creative with it in context. Here as well, there is a DIY dimension to the

technology: it is built on top of an open-source environment, which allows one to create their own scenes. These workshop can consist of a mix of sound-walks with existing RJDJ scenes and brainstorming design session; programming session for composing one’s own scenes; and/or a “make your own speakers/sound-parasites” DIY hacking workshop for turning surfaces into a speakers, from junk boxes to windows.

4.2 Adaptive Public Displays This up-coming project aims to develop techniques for more effective engagement and interaction with situated public displays, by exploring the potential of people's everyday activity (such as walking or pausing) as a trigger for display adaptation. It responds to the significant increase of situated displays in public settings for cultural, commercial, and sports content, as well as findings from recent studies, which suggest that people tend not to engage with these displays [3]. The project aims to combine expertise in ethnographic user studies, HCI, vision technology and digital content development to identify key aspects of the activities of people in the immediate environment of displays, recover these using computer vision techniques, and exploit the recovered features to adapt the situated displays (e.g. presentation and navigation of content, actual content, and interaction mechanisms).

5. CONCLUSIONS This paper presented some of the engagement activities taking place at Culture Lab, using digital technologies, within the SiDE project and beyond. Each of these activities is an example of how novel technologies and novel uses of existing technologies can foster engagement when done in a context that encourages creativity and user empowerment.

6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We wish to thank the entire SiDE project (in particular Kamila Wajda from Bremen University for her work in the Sundroids project), the Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies as well as our partner organisations, e.g. Generator, Tyneside Cinema and the Harehope Quarry Project.

7. REFERENCES [1] Gaye, L., Tanaka, A., Richardson, R., Jo, K. Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy: Digital Creative Engagement and Youth-Led Innovation. IDC 2010. [2] Kafai, Y. B. and Mitchel Resnick, M. Constructionism in Practice: Designing,Thinking, and Learning in a Digital World. Mallory International, 1996. [3] Kray, C., Galani, A., Rohs, M. Facilitating Opportunistic Interaction with Ambient Displays. CHI 2008. [4] RJDJ. http://www.rjdj.me [5] SIDE project. http://research.ncl.ac.uk/side/