Welcome to a K3 seminar with Joshka Wessels, Senior Lecturer in Communication for Development, K3.

The title of the talk is:

Why we need more empathy. Syrian video activism, immersive cinematic VR and emotional intelligence.

It will take place on Wednesday, September 11 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk.

In this seminar, I will analyse the relationship between experiences of war, emotions, 360-degree YouTube videos and cinematic VR. In 2014, I interviewed a range of video activists from Aleppo for my postdoctoral research project on the role of YouTube in the Syrian uprisings. In order for them to tell the world their story, the Syrian video activists used their mobile phones to the maximum and experimented with all kinds of digital audiovisual technology such as drone technology and 360-degree video cameras. The first 360-video from a war zone was filmed by Syrian video activists in Aleppo. In 2014, British filmmaker Christian Stephen of RYOT, connected with video activists from Aleppo Media Centre (AMC) inside Syria to record 360-degree video. It consisted of a rig with 6 GoPro cameras who recorded 360-degree video in realtime, which could them be experienced and watched by a user using a head mounted set, like the Oculus Rift headset. In 2015, Youtube enabled uploads of 360-degree videos and this led to the first ever 360-degree video footage from a warzone, from Aleppo, entitled ‘Welcome to Aleppo’.

Syrian filmmaker and video activist Abdallah Hakawati recorded a video clip in the district of Bustan al Qasr in Aleppo during daily bombings, which later became known as the ‘Freedom Song Girl’. In the clip, which was recorded on 16 November 2012, a young girl sings a famous revolutionary song about freedom, during a protest in Aleppo. She is repeatedly singing her hope for freedom when she is suddenly interrupted by a deadly bomb blast that erupts behind her (Al Arabiya, 2013). This video clip went viral, up to a point that Abdallah Hakawati lost total control over where the clip was being distributed. When the Freedom Song Girl YouTube video went viral, it was picked up by many different international news agencies. Eventually the clip caught the attention of Nonny de la Peña, a pioneer media artist from California. De la Peña is from the University of Southern California (USC) and has been at the forefront of the use of Virtual Reality technology in documentary and journalism. She has developed so-called Immersive Journalism, which is a form of media production that allows first person experience of the events or situations described in news reports and documentary film (de la Peña et al., 2010). de la Peña shares the concern that the overload of audiovisual information available today, desensitizes audiences who then become indifferent to the suffering of others and predicts that the role of Immersive Journalism could reinstitute the audience’s emotional involvement in current events (Ibid. p.298). The first person experience is generated by the use of a head-mounted display, which places the user in a virtual 3D environment that will give an embodied experience (Ibid. p.292).

In 2016, the premiere of the Boost Hbg, Film-i-Skåne and Malmö Stad supported cinematic VR film “Flykten från Sverige” took place at the library of the city of Malmö. The experience, which was directed by me, went on tour through Skåne and other places in Sweden and eventually won a prize for best VR in 2018 at Skåne’s Pixel filmfestival due to the emotional impact of the installation. “Flykten från Sverige” is a fiction cinematic VR installation, viewed on a VR headset and tells the story of a flight from Malmö under bombardment, from the point of view of an eight-year old child. The installation is interactive and users can experience three different scenarios of fleeing from Malmö under war. Spatial sound recording was used to enhance the feeling of presence in VR. The production team used so-called emotional mapping to design how the single-user should feel at the end of each scenario; despair, frustration and relief. The emotional impact of the piece was considerable, with users sometimes crying after both the despair or frustration scenarios.

The use of immersive cinematic VR has been coined as an ultimate medium to enhance empathy and bring more understanding for the point of view of others. Through the use Virtual Reality Perspective Taking (VRPT) (van Loon et al., 2018) the user is placed in a situation where he/she rarely or never will be and looks at the world through the eyes of someone else. van Loon (2018) claims that VRPT increases cognitive empathy for specific others. Comparing the use of 360-degree video to report from the Syrian War with the development of immersive journalism and cinematic VR for fictive interactive scenarios of refugee experiences, I am critically discussing the assumption whether VRPT is necessarily a ‘force for good’.

References:

Al Arabiya, ‘Song Sung Blue: footage of singing Syrian hit by blast goes viral’, 6 February 2013,  https://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2013/02/06/264782.html.

van Loon, A., Bailenson, J., Zaki, J., Bostick, J. and Willer, R. (2018) Virtual reality perspective-taking increases cognitive empathy for specific others. PLOS ONE 13(8): e0202442.

de la Peña, Nonny, Peggy Weil, Joan Llobera Elias Giannopoulos Ausiàs Pomés, Bernhard Spanlang, ‘Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News’,  Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 19/4 (2010), pp. 291-301. 

Welcome to a K3 seminar with  Michael Degerald, Visiting Researcher, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University

The title of the talk is:

Heritage, archives, and state power: Digital traces of Iraq’s cultural and political history in state media and publications.

It will take place on Wednesday, September 4 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk.

During the course of my dissertation research, I made pdf copies of dozens of Arabic magazines, books, and journals published by the Iraqi state. With the help of a grant from the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, I constructed a digital archive to make these texts available to others to facilitate research. These sources have value for modern Iraqi history, but yet more lurks under the surface. These publications speak to a variety of topics and were part of a large scale, ‘pre-digital’ attempt to shift Iraqi and international public opinion. While they are clearly part of Iraqi cultural heritage, they can be quite racist and toxic in their rhetoric and represent the work of a government many Iraqis would understandably like to forget.

In addition to the discourses they contain, the texts themselves have stamps and markings that represent complex geographies of power traversed by the books from their publication to their various locations in collections outside of Iraq. The USA acquired many such publications for its research libraries, but Iraq also sponsored their dissemination, with many bearing stamps that say they were gifts from the Iraqi government. Digging into the US acquisitions finds some of them related to international wheat sales and book acquisitions under PL-480, shedding light on far more than seemingly obscure books. The answer of just how those books came to the USA speaks to trends shaping Middle Eastern studies, postcolonial development, and our ability to study media history and the history of the modern Middle East most broadly. What does it mean to work with texts that were manipulated by multiple states for their own ends? And where do I fit, as an outsider studying Iraq?

The fall program for the K3 seminar series is now ready. Just click on the “Seminar Series Fall 2019” button.

The spring seminar serie is now finished. We will start again in late August. Have a nice summer break.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Maja Fagerberg Ranten, Interaction Designer and PhD student in Computer Science, Roskilde University

The title of her talk is:

Designing for Bodies with Bodies. Designing artistic interactive systems from a phenomenological perspective.

The talk will take place on Wednesday, May 29, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk, as well as a bio.

Designing for Bodies with Bodies is a bodily interaction design program that investigates the designers’ bodily interaction with materials when designing artistic interactive systems. To locate phenomenology within research through design requires new attention to the role of the designer in her processes; a focus on sensory perceptive presence, memories and the active participation of the lived body. The initial framing of the project is based on an annotated portfolio of previous interactive installations. These are all large-scale interactive installations that elicit embodied behaviour executed in social settings at events and festivals. The program will unfold through practice-based research where exploratory prototypes will be done as experiments investigating a designers framework of both physical material, computational material, and the body as material.

Maja Fagerberg Ranten is an Interaction Designer and PhD Fellow at Computer Science, Roskilde University, Denmark. She is part of the Copenhagen art and technology scene and has a big repertoire of interactive art installations from the design collaboration UNMAKE and as a member of the art collective illutron. At Roskilde University, she is a co-founder of the research collective Exocollective where the research focus is on digital material exploration in interactive design, art, and technology.

The talk will be a presentation of the PhD project framing and the work so far. It will be structured as an informal 50% seminar with the Somatics reading group: Susan Kozel, Marika Hedemyr and Sarah Homewood as unofficial respondents.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Åsa Harvard Maare, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication, K3 and Charlotte Asbjørn Sörensen, Lecturer in Product Design, K3.

The title of their talk is:

Experiential, embodied and practice-oriented learning: perspectives on teaching and learning at K3.

The talk will take place on Wednesday, May 22, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk:

We will approach the pedagogy of K3 from our different pedagogical perspectives, with the aim to visualize the pedagogical landscapes at K3 and establish a joint language. Central concepts are practice-based research, experiential learning, peer learning, production-oriented learning, skilled learners, embodiment and collaboration.

Åsa Harvard Maare: Conceptualizing students’ contributions to the learning process (20 min presentation)

Charlotte Asbjørn Sörensen: Applying theoretical perspectives in a design process: pedagogical challenges (20 min presentation)

All: Discussion. How can we facilitate exchange between programs, teachers and students at K3? Are there research opportunities that could strengthen and develop the multi-faceted pedagogies used at K3?

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Jens Pedersen, Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design at K3. The title of his talk is:

Cultivating desire and absence in design ethnography

The talk will take place on Wednesday, May 15, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk:

In this talk I’ll argue that researching desire is the key to make ethnographic fieldwork work and be productive for designers. Ethnography has long been a stable of design research, but there is lack of clarity about how an ethnography should be crafted to be ‘generative’ for design as it were. Typically, the role of ethnography is framed as one of ‘informing’ design, but it is typically unclear how a deeper understanding of the present can be productive in imagining the future. Drawing on experiences from working with ethnography in design practice (and the supervision of many student projects) I argue that traditional ethnographic approaches borrowed from anthropology and sociology are problematic in design because they tend to be ‘presentist’. For a design ethnography to not just inform, but also inspire it needs to focus not just on what ‘is presently there’, but also on what ‘is manifestly not there’, what is absent.

This may sound — maybe — unnecessarily theoretical, but in the talk I give concrete examples of how a text focusing on present absences (desires) compared to just presence performs differently vis-à-vis the designer — how the former inspire ideas where the later does not.   

Because of a certain disappointment with ethnography in design we have seen various arguments for moving beyond ethnography towards more interventionist approaches that dismisses the value of understanding the present to design the future. The problem with these approaches, however, is that they also frame ethnography in presentist terms and therefore tend to overlook the potential of ethnography. The talk, then, is an attempt to both reconceptualise and rehabilitate ethnography in design by cultivating an appreciation of desire and absence in design ethnography.

The K3 seminar scheduled with Johan Farkas on May 20 will be moved to Tuesday August 27. This is his 30 percent PhD seminar. Presently he is in a rather heavy interview phase of this PhD work. It is therefore better to have the seminar when that phase is over.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Maliheh Ghajargar, Associate Senior Lecturer in Interaction Technologies at K3. The title of her talk is:

A journey from (Industrial) design to (Interaction) design… and vice versa

The talk will take place on Wednesday, April 24, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk:

During my first K3 seminar I would like to mainly introduce my previous works, present a synthesis and then introduce a preliminary research idea that I am currently developing! So, my seminar will have three main parts: The first part will be an introduction about my previous design and research projects as a design researcher and design practitioner, with a particular focus on my PhD dissertation project entitled: Designing Tools for Reflection: a Concept-driven Approach”.

The second part will be about a design approach and probably also a design methodology, that I think it has been developing during and after my PhD dissertation and it is still in progress! That approach is inspired by research through design and concept-driven approaches (e.g. Stolterman, E. & Wiberg, M., 2010). It favours a cross-disciplinary, inclusive and critical approach in design (Ghajargar, M., & Bardzell, J., 2019) and it has four main phases from informing by theories to constructing theories.

And the last part of my seminar will be focused on my research project idea, that I am currently developing. The topic is around aesthetics and forms of interaction with everyday use objects that make us think and reflect on actions, by using IoT technologies — e.g. in the areas of education, energy consumption or health. From a design perspective, I would use aesthetics as an approach that does not only value the arts and the beauty of everyday life, but also as an integral and essential part of the usefulness of interactive artefacts. I will inform my work by available literatures across different disciplines on form giving practices, aesthetics of interaction, and design for reflection, so hopefully, to be able to (re-)open up to some areas to (re-)explore.

Hence, as the title of my presentation suggests, I wish to make sense of my journey from being an industrial designer to an interaction design researcher, by constructively building upon the resources and values that these different areas of design, share.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Jakob Svensson, professor of Media and Communication Studies at K3. The title of his talk is:

Behind the News-Ranking Algorithm. Actors, conflicts and logics when implementing algorithmic automation

The talk will take place on Wednesday, April 17, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk:

This study revolves around on the process of introducing and implementing an algorithm to rank and mix news on the front-page of a leading Scandinavian daily. The focus of this article is what happens to an institution with its’ taken-for-granted norms, rules and imagination, when introduced to algorithmic automation. This is studied through a qualitative methodology mainly consisting of interviews. The aim is to contribute with a sociological approach to researching algorithms with a focus on the actors, conflicts and logics involved behind algorithms. Actors involved can be grouped into traditional news actors (journalists and editors), and tech actors -(programmers, UX designers, data analysts, tech and web developers). The media group, to which the daily adhered, was an actor with its demand for profit, including the advertising and the subscription departments, as well as the newspaper brand and the algorithm itself. The study discerns three different logics, sometimes competing and sometimes intersecting: a market logic with its value of profit, a higher purpose logic of news journalism with its values of democracy, and finally a logic of personalization with its popularity principle and imagination of giving users what they want through an unbiased algorithm. The article concludes that while journalism is not completely taken over by programmers and algorithms, it is apparent that tech actors, with their values of user experience, rules of data-driven development and logic of personalization, are becoming a force to be reckoned with.