This investigation explores relations between 1) a theory of human cognition, called Embodied Cognition, 2) the design of interactive systems and 3) the practice of ‘creative group meetings’ (of which the so-called ‘brainstorm’ is perhaps the best-known example). The investigation is one of Research-through-Design (Overbeeke et al., 2006). This means that, together with students and external stakeholders, I designed two interactive prototypes. Both systems contain a ‘mix’ of both physical and digital forms. Both are designed to be tools in creative meeting sessions, or brainstorms. The tools are meant to form a natural, element in the physical meeting space. The function of these devices is to support the formation of shared insight: that is, the tools should support the process by which participants together, during the activity, get a better grip on the design challenge that they are faced with. Over a series of iterations I reflected on the design process and outcome, and investigated how users interacted with the prototypes.
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In part one of this chapter, I commence by positioning my artistic PhD project in its field of practice (performance, scenography, fine arts), before describing and presenting the variety of methods that I deploy to research, develop and document the questions that I am concerned with. In part two, I zoom in on the case study, Thresholds of Touch, a performative experiment based on an inter-disciplinary collaboration between a composer/researcher, a sociologist and an artist/researcher (myself). I share how we set up a collaborative methodology between social science and artistic research, and what it contributed to researching touch from my perspective on practice-based research. The power relations between disciplines, methods and forms of expression/ knowledge will be traced and discussed. Finally, in the conclusion I reflect on the research outcomes and speculate on how different documentation strategies would have foregrounded other experiences, insights and/or knowledge.
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In this paper, we describe a promising method to evaluate the location of fingermarks on two-dimensional objects, which provides valuable information for the evaluation of fingermarks at activity level. For this purpose, an experiment with pillowcases was conducted at the Dutch music festival Lowlands, to test whether the activity ‘smothering’ can be distinguished from an alternative activity like ‘changing a pillowcase’ based on the touch traces on pillowcases left by the activities. Participants performed two activities with paint on their hands: smothering a victim with the use of a pillow and changing a pillowcase of a pillow. The pillowcases were photographed and translated into grid representations. A binary classification model was used to classify the pillowcases into one of the two classes of smothering and changing, based on the distance between the grid representations. After applying the fitted model to a test set, we obtained an accuracy of 98.8%. The model showed that the pillowcases could be well separated into the two classes of smothering and changing, based on the location of the fingermarks. The proposed method can be applied to fingermark traces on all two-dimensional items for which we expect that different activities will lead to different fingermark locations.
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