News » Two contributions to appear at Creativity and Cognition 2021.
These are a pictorial on student documentation practices and a short paper on spectrality as a resource for designing mixed-reality soundscapes.
Pictorial entitled ‘Probing Documentation Practices: Reflecting on Students’ Conceptions, Values, and Experiences with Documentation in Creative Inquiry’ and coauthored by Ricky Chen, Mychajlo Demko, Daragh Byrne, and Marti Louw.
This research examines how maker-based teaching and learning impact the ways students practice and value process documentation. Educational environments like design studios and makerspaces rely heavily on the physicality of students’ work in hands-on, creative mediums. Transitioning learning and making to remote formats due to the pandemic provided an opportune moment to reflect on creative making curricula and its relationship to space, tools, and materials. Using a research-through-design approach we deployed a remote design probe to examine students’ current understanding, contexts, values, and experiences with documentation and its integration with technology, space, and education. We report our findings from five activities completed over a one-week period by 15 students enrolled in undergraduate interdisciplinary creative programs. We illustrate how students have been navigating documentation practices as they continue to learn and work in new, remote settings. We demonstrate that despite different disciplinary standards, students share common values in how documentation connects with deeper learning processes.
‘Evoking the Post-industrial Landscape Memories through Spectrality and Mixed Reality Soundscapes’ coauthored by Yixiao Fu, Daragh Byrne, and Lawrence Shea
Spectrality describes the spatiotemporal relationships between landscape and memories where the past ‘haunt’ the present. We explore how spatialized soundscapes may evoke the spectral memories of physical landscape. To do this, we curated a site-specific mixed reality audio walk at Carrie Furnace, a national historic landmark in Pittsburgh’s ‘Rivers of Steel’ National Heritage area. This audio walk leverages virtual soundscapes, mobile mixed reality, and open-ended narratives. Each visitor takes a unique path through the spectral memories of the site’s industrial past and post-industrial relics. Findings from an eleven-person user study assess our approach to spatialized spectral soundscapes and reveal the dimensions (content, context, experience) that resonate with audiences.