pdc2008.org

addingPOSITIVITY is a global framework that is fueled by the dynamics of many diverse individuals with the overall intent of adding positivity to the world. The system calls for responses from participants to be collected in both the virtual and physical realm and then given back to a broader audience for additional participation in forming a continuously changing exhibit. The project encourages consideration of similarities and differences in worldview and encourages an increased awareness of the impact of participants' interactions with their environments and with others. It is our hope that the information gathered will also reciprocate through action and additional ideas.

Bite size questions which change within a set pattern will be digitally distributed through a website and a widget (a downloadable interface that appears instantaneously on screen when a computer is turned on). Each question will instigate a level of contemplation towards the details of life that are often taken for granted - changing participants' lens of looking at their everyday life. These questions fall under the umbrella of adding positivity to the world, such that they hold a universal value that can connect to people globally.

Questions and answers collected virtually will be displayed in a dynamic, minimal web interface as well as through a temporal, morphing installation. The display will communicate the contemplative value of the project in its simplicity, its attention to exhibit details and choice of materials and a tactility that will welcome participation. Exhibit participants will be able to add their responses to the questions, adding to the collection of answers. Participants will also be encouraged to pose future questions and the evolution of the installation over the conference duration will be recorded and fed back to the project website. http://www.addingpositivity.org

Sareena Sernsukskul is an educator and a graphic designer with a global background having lived in many places in Asia and the United States. She received her BFA in Industrial Design from Rhode Island School of Design, her MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University School of Art, and will begin her study in Architecture at University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 2008. Upon graduating from Yale, she worked for award winning exhibition design firm in San Francisco and graphic design firm in Bangkok (Thailand) before launching as an educator and a freelance designer. She has lectured in the International Program in Design and Architecture at Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok) and in the Communication Design Department at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (Bangkok). With her background as a global nomad and her education in different design disciplines, she is interested in the intersection between cultures and between design fields. In addition, she is also interested in the holistic nature of design seeing it as integral to life, and the development of people and society. Her research investigates into the relationship between meditation and the design process. While her clients include WildAid, Chulalongkorn University and Soulflower Gallery among others.

Ann McDonald is an educator and designer who has created an award winning body of work in interactive, virtual and physical spaces. She studied at the Institute of Design in Chicago, earned a BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle and subsequently received a MFA in graphic design from Yale University. Currently she is an assistant professor in design and multimedia studies at Northeastern University in Boston. Her research investigates collective participation at the intersection of digital and physical environments and the tension between public and private uses of the screen/image in the urban realm. Ongoing creative projects include educational games and interactive projects with social relevance that can best be achieved through interdisciplinary collaboration. Exhibit and interactive design work for The Boston Symphony Orchestra, The New England Aquarium, The National Health Sciences Consortium and the American Society of Plant Biology have offered wide audiences access to complex topics. Her interactive experiments explore the relationship between narrative and an information space.

Our interactions with personal electronic devices provoke a broad range of emotional states from frustration to confusion to feverish obsession. Increasingly, these devices mediate our everyday work activities, our social network development and our personal communications. This participatory installation aims to bring critical awareness and consideration to the complex relationship between people and their technological artifacts. These 'Body-Technology Interfaces,' (BTIs) in the form of hand-knitted custom wrappers for personal electronic devices, will reflect salient interaction behaviors between the participant and their chosen device. Participants will actively engage in the creation of artistic artifacts that are prototyped to their needs. Over the course of the PDC, our installation will uncover insights into the dynamics of human-device relationships of the conference attendees. Participants will choose to engage in all or some of our three-stage process of discovery. In stage one we will interview participants in order to articulate their relationships with their personal electronic devices. Based on our interpretation of this data and in collaboration with the participant, we will propose an appropriate BTI design that can then be created by the participant, by our team, or collaboratively with others. In the third stage, participants present both their BTI and their response to the experience in the installation space itself or online on the project website. The website will also serve as an archive for BTI designs and participant reflections created during the conference. The individualized ideation of BTIs establishes a formal examination of our everyday experiences with technology and the creation of an artifact that challenges or confronts some aspects of this interaction. Body Technology Interfaces enable participants to create new and possibly startling experiences with familiar devices, while also challenging creators to engage with colleagues and conference participants in reflective discussion and collaborative development.

Becky Stern is a graduate student in sculpture at Arizona State University. With her unique background in art, design, & technology from Parsons the New School for Design, she creates artwork and writings about the exciting intersections therein. She's a perennial do-it-yourselfer and writes regularly for DIY Magazines MAKE and CRAFT. In her free time she enjoys traveling, barcodes, culture jamming, plants, soldering and knitting

Aisling Kelliher is an assistant professor in Media Communication systems and Media Theory with the Arts, Media and Engineering program at Arizona State University. She also has a joint appointment as an assistant professor in Industrial Design with the College of Design also at ASU. Aisling develops everyday software applications for creating and sharing rich-media story compositions. Her research interests include rich-media storytelling, narrative complexity, media annotation and archiving, integrated sensing technologies, experiential design, embodied technology and design for healing. She has presented her work at leading cultural (e.g. DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park) and academic venues (e.g. ACM, CHI, ISEA, TIDSE) and recently co-chaired an NSF sponsored workshop on Creative IT.

The Long Table is inspired by the film Antonia’s Line by Maureen Gorris. In this film a woman returns to the Dutch countryside to raise her young daughter and founds a communal house where the residents defy convention and live life as they please. The central image of the film is a dinner table that grows longer and longer as this family of friends, outsiders and eccentrics gets bigger and bigger. Eventually, the table becomes so long it has to be brought outside into the yard.

The Long Table experiments with democracy and public engagement by combining a relaxed dinner table atmosphere with a conventional public forum and encouraging informal conversation on serious topics. It is an event with a beginning and an end, a theme but no fixed agenda and no host or moderator. The artist will be in attendance to ensure that the protocol or ‘etiquette’ is followed.

With this Long Table on the Margins of Technology, we hope to inspire a discussion about who is silenced, who is peripheral and whose participation is constrained by lack of access, knowledge, confidence, sense of agency and vision. But it is also to place the focus away from the technologised and upon the human.

The Long Table on the Margins of Technology will be a partner piece to the Long Table on Technology and Democracy held as part of the Democratising Technology (DemTech) exhibition The Not Quite Yet (Jan-March 2008, Space Art Gallery, London, www.thenotquiteyet.net) and then displayed for the duration of the exhibition as table, embroidered tablecloth and sound files. DemTech explored how to use art and performance techniques to engage those marginalised from design decisions and support them in becoming more involved into discussions about technology.

Lois Weaver is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary, University of London and an independent performance artist, director and activist. She has been a performer, director, and writer with the Split Britches Company since 1980. Her interests include live art, solo performance, feminist and lesbian theatre, democracy and public engagement and performance and human rights. She was involved in Staging Human Rights, a People's Palace Project initiative that uses performance practice to explore human rights in women’s prisons in Brazil and the UK. She collaborated and performed with Curious on an investigation of the relationship between smell entitled On The Scent. Lois was Artistic Director for Performing Rights, an international conference and festival on the themes of performance and human rights held in London in 2006 and is Producing Director for East End Collaborations, an annual platform for emerging live artists. She is currently principal investigator on Democratising Technology, a research project that uses performance techniques to initiate conversations on technology design. Lois tours with the Library of Performing Rights and What Tammy Needs To Know and is developing a new solo performance entitled Diary of a Domestic Terrorist and a Split Britches collaboration entitled, Miss America.

Dr Ann Light is Reader in Interaction, Media and Communication in the Communication and Computing Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University and, till recently, a Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She is interested in the social impact of technology and the politics of participation in design, explored in a range of current projects: as well as Democratising Technology (DemTech: www.demtech.qmul.ac.uk), she is involved in Fair Tracing (www.fairtracing.org), and Practical Design for Social Action (www.technologyandsocialaction.org). She helps run a charity using ICT for cultural exchange between Africa and Europe (www.fiankoma.org) and works a day a week in a user-centred design company (www.flowinteractive.com). She publishes in the areas of human computer interaction, usability, interactive media and design, with a focus upon meaning-making and experience of interactive technology, begun in studies of websites and online discussion lists in 1995 and now turned upon mobile and ubiquitous contexts of use.

Patrick GT Healey is a Reader in Cognitive Science and leads the Interaction, Media and Communication Group and Augmented Human Interaction Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London. Digital technologies provide uniquely flexible media with the potential to transform human communication. They offer new ways to capture, modify and project communicative actions (eg words, gestures and expressions). This creates the potential for new forms of mutual-engagement and new forms of ‘language’ or communicative conventions. Pat's research applies models of human communication - drawn mainly from Psychology and Sociology - to understanding these processes. It uses technology both as an experimental tool for the study of interaction and as an application area for testing and developing theories of interaction.

Gini Simpson is the head of SPACE Media Arts. SPACE is an arts and education charity based in Hackney, east London. Founded by Brigit Riley in 1968, SPACE innovates and supports the provision of contemporary arts activity in London and provides gallery, public art and training specialisms as well as studio provision across London. SPACE Media Arts undertakes large scale electronic arts projects linking artists and communities and provides open access to new technology in east London. This has included working with award winning artists, street gangs from Bow and in patients at a London psychiatric hospital. Previous to this, Gini worked for DDB Advertising and Magic Lantern productions ITV. She has produced art events nationally and internationally, including the production of the first New Media marquee and field at Glastonbury Festival. Artistically, she has shown work at the Venice Biennial,(Italian Pavilion) and produced the first interactive film shown at the Berlin Film festival (2000). She is a co-founder of Mad Chicks and works extensively with Mad Pride, a mental health civil rights movement

Three to four folding tables will be set along the shore of the pond in the IU Arboretum or nearby water source. Each table will be provided with a stack of white paper, a set of waterproof markers and instructions for how to fold a sheet of paper to create a paper boat. Participants are invited to make paper boats, upon which they will write a message or hope and then set them adrift on in the pond. During the course of the day, the pond will become increasingly filled with the boats that will set sail down the creek. The intent is to provide participants with an experience that is at once private and public, in much the same spirit as the placement of prayers into the rack n the Wailing Wall and the annual floating of 1,000 paper cranes in Hiroshima to commemorate the victims of the atomic bomb.

Hugh Musick is a Chicago-based artist and writer. His conceptual works aspire to transform ideas into physical realities in an effort to synthesize the imagined and the real. In realizing concepts, he hopes to expand viewers and participants’ sense of empowerment and creative potential. Public participation plays an essential role in these concepts as it did in 2007’s Clark Street Bridge Percussion Orchestra, a work that required the participation of more than 100 participants. Over the last decade, he has produced almost one thousand works that combine collage and very short fiction. Some of these works may be seen and read at www.hughmusick.com. A frequent contributor to Ambidextrous, the magazine of The Stanford Design School, he also serves as the Associate Dean of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design. Founded in 1937 by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy as The New Bauhaus, The Institute of Design is one of the world’s leading schools in teaching design methods and frameworks for innovation and new business development. Hugh Musick is married to Judine O’Shea and is the father of Morley and Eleanor Musick

The Supacollager system generates web-image collages through gesture-based recognition. For the 2008 PDC, we will devise a Flickr group for conference attendees, such as PDC 2008 Images, to upload images and thus query from a set of images that are situated in the event. We believe that Supacollager provides users with an experience of making meaning in a type of art that is open and accessible. Additionally, conference attendees will be able to witness the collages change and grow over time; thus, their artwork will be in a constant state of flux.

Isaac Wallis holds a Bachelor of Music in Music Synthesis from Berklee College of Music and a Master of Music in Composition from Arizona State University, where he is currently pursuing a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences in the Arts, Media, and Engineering program.

Sarah Hatton received her B.F.A in Electronic Media from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. She is currently an MFA student in digital technology and is also pursuing her concentration in Arts, Media and Engineering as a research assistant on the Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab (SMALLab). Her work has been published, presented or exhibited in Phoenix, Los Angeles (Sandbox '08), Pittsburgh, Philadelphia (iDMAa 2007), the UK, and Denmark (IDC 2007).

Joseph Adams received his BA in Liberal Arts from Bard College in 2004. His undergraduate work was a combination of Asian studies and media arts. He is currently an associate with the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University and is seeking a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences in the Arts, Media, and Engineering program.