This research report contains the findings of an international study consisting of three online ‘living’ surveys. The surveys focused on how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted sign language interpreters’ working practices, how this was experienced by them, and how digital disruption caused by the pandemic is impacting and innovating the sign language interpreting profession. The study was carried out between April 2020 and July 2020; the largest contingent of respondents over all three surveys were from the U.S., followed by the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland and Belgium. Respondents commented that the crisis will probably accelerate the need for remote interpreting training in interpreter training programs. Another resurfacing issue was the perceived need for sign language interpreting students to have face-to-face practice and live mentoring. Respondents commented on what benefits they thought remote interpreting might bring to the table, both for themselves and for deaf people. In general, the most significant benefits that were mentioned were flexibility and the possibility to improve efficiency and availability of sign language interpreting services. Notwithstanding these benefits, a significant number of respondents claimed that remote interpreting is more stressful than face-to-face interpreting and requires a heavier cognitive load.
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Poor work-life balance (WLB) has been linked to negative outcomes such as increased stress, anxiety, depression, and a perceived reduction in the overall quality of life. At an institutional level, these may include lowered employee commitment and decreased productivity at work. The advent of COVID-19 has necessitated fundamental alterations to work experience and the ways in which WLB may be perceived. This phenomenological study employed qualitative, in-depth interviews to explore higher education academics’ lived experiences of remote working and how they perceived this had impacted their well-being (WB) and WLB. Using purposive samplings, respondents were drawn from HE sectors in the Netherlands, and the UK. The findings offered an understanding of how remote and hybrid teaching delivery during the pandemic affected academics’ actual experiences of WB and WLB. These findings serve to enhance policymakers’ understandings of significant occupational health and WB issues within a post-pandemic education service paradigm.
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Deictic gestures are gestures we make during communication to point at objects or persons. Indicative acts of directing-to guide the addressee to an object, while placing-for acts place an object for the addressee’s attention. Commonly used presentation software tools, such as PowerPoint and Keynote, offer ample support for placing-for gestures, e.g. slide transitions, progressive disclosure of list items and animations. Such presentation tools, however, do not generally offer adequate support for the directing-to indicative act (i.e. pointing gestures). In this paper we argue the value of presenting deictic gestures to a remote audience. Our research approach is threefold: identify indicative acts that are naturally produced by presenters; design tangible gestures for multi-touch surfaces that replicate the intent of those indicative acts; and design a set of graphical effects for remote viewing that best represent these indicative acts for the audience. Clinton Jorge1, Jos P. van Leeuwen2, Dennis Dams3, Jan Bouwen4 1 University of Madeira, Madeira-ITI, Funchal, Portugal; 2 The Hague University of Applied Sciences, The Hague, Netherlands; 3,4 Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Antwerp, Belgium Copyright shared between: University of Madeira, Madeira-ITI, Funchal, Portugal; The Hague University of Applied Sciences, The Hague, Netherlands; Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Antwerp, Belgium
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Society continues to place an exaggerated emphasis on women's skins, judging the value of lives lived within, by the colour and condition of these surfaces. This artistic research will explore how the skin of a painting might unpack this site of judgement, highlight its objectification, and offer women alternative visualizations of their own sense of embodiment. This speculative renovation of traditional concepts of portrayal will explore how painting, as an aesthetic body whose material skin is both its surface and its inner content (its representations) can help us imagine our portrayal in a different way, focusing, not on what we look like to others, but on how we sense, touch, and experience. How might we visualise skin from its ghostly inner side? This feminist enquiry will unfold alongside archival research on The Ten Largest (1906-07), a painting series by Swedish Modernist Hilma af Klint. Initial findings suggest the artist was mapping traditional clothing designs into a spectral, painterly idea of a body in time. Fundamental methods research, and access to newly available Af Klint archives, will expand upon these roots in maps and women’s craft practices and explore them as political acts, linked to Swedish Life Reform, and knowingly sidestepping a non-inclusive art history. Blending archival study with a contemporary practice informed by eco-feminism is an approach to artistic research that re-vivifies an historical paradigm that seems remote today, but which may offer a new understanding of the past that allows us to also re-think our present. This mutuality, and Af Klint’s rhizomatic approach to image-making, will therefore also inform the pedagogical development of a Methods Research programme, as part of this post-doc. This will extend across MA and PhD study, and be further enriched by pedagogy research at Cal-Arts, Los Angeles, and Konstfack, Stockholm.
In this project, a consortium of Fraunhofer Innovation Platform (FIP-AM@UT), Connec2 and Walraven will investigate the possibility of two-way communication between production machines and an XR (eXtended Reality) platform. This communication can benefit the installation, commissioning and maintenance of specialty machines by connecting remote experts to local technicians and the machine in a virtual environment. This can reduce the necessity for travelling of remote experts (machine builders, programmers, process engineers), which leads to faster respond times and improves the well-being of these experts. Through the XR platform of Connec2, which is already used in the market for online meetings, presentations and collaboration, we can enable monitoring as well as (managed) control of a machine. For this we need to extend the production machine control with an interface that allows for remote connections. Special attention will be given to the safety and security aspects of the system. At all times, the machine should be safe for its direct users and surrounding. Things like loss of connectivity or network latency may not lead to dangerous situations. Another thread to the safety of the machine might be unauthorized access to the system. A secure system design will have to prevent this. The project not only aims to design such a system, but also to create a demonstrator of the development. Cooperation between local and remote users of a machine can be tested and validated at the shopfloor of the Advanced Manufacturing Center, a fieldlab for innovating digital production techniques.
