UX for Meaningful Interactions

How might we disrupt filter bubbles and echo chambers in a post-truth world to create meaningful and open interactions, discourse and communities online when our confirmation bias and the disinhibition effect tell us to do something else?

This studio provides a deep dive into User Experience(UX) design process and the underlying principles that inform the design of interaction and information. Working across all aspects of the design process from initialisation and user research to high fidelity design outcomes, you will develop a rich understanding of design methods and the ability to apply them in context. 

By the end of the semester you will have created works via a number of projects. Focus will also be given to presentation of projects via a portfolio and through “pitches”.

This studio expects you to have knowledge of UX design and caters to those who have either completed the User Experiences design specialisation, or will be undertaking it at the same time as this studio, or have acquired it in other studios and specialisation classes.

Audiovision

Sound permeates, drives and mutates temporal media. It shapes emotional response, and fundamentally influences attention and perception in the consumption of visual material. Exploring the mechanics of this process and honing your skills as sonic practitioners when applying these fundamental principles is the focus of this course.

Audiovision provides you with the opportunity to develop scores and/or sound designs for a variety of media. Through opportunities to collaborate with animators, film makers, g ame designers advertisers, dancers and installation artists you will apply the skills you have acquired across
a range of projects. Many of these opportunities are brought into the class, but will run alongside self-guided and self-sourced projects as well.

Audiovision actively integrates with other Digital Media Studios and Specialisations (covering Digital Video, Digital Environments and Interactive projects). Other program collaborations include Games, Animation, Radio, Media and Creative Writing. This studio is not only an opportunity to hone your craft but to improve your skills in analysis, communication and creative practice. Beyond the contacts and skills you will be cultivating, through a consistent and ambitious weekly workload you will be substantially contributing to a folio of work, ultimately designed to showcase your talents to prospective employers.

For the advanced students, work integrated learning and mentorship opportunities are provided, drawing from professional productions in theatre, dance, installation and film.

Digital Facades

This studio will focus on developing public video experiences that respond to 360 spherical video. Digital Facades studio will teach you how to respond to making videos for public displays by developing, researching, and producing high quality advanced 360 videos which incorporate visual effects, live action filming and motion graphics within a digital media context.

You will work in small groups to produce four assignments using After Effects and Premiere Pro workflows that lead to the development of a single motion sequence. Each group will need to conduct both out of class fieldwork and classroom studio work to produce initial prototypes, user testing, and final exhibition delivery.

Minimalist Interactives and Environments

Underpining the proliferation of the digital is the techno-uptopian ideal of the limitless. Since the late 20th Century, VR evangelists and gamers alike have salivated over the notion of endlessly traversable virtual worlds; today, we expect our favourite streaming services to provide a countless array of movies and music. Under this regime, boundaries are there to be pushed, and limits are there to be broken. Yet, this pursuit of the limitless is the pursuit of consumption: of the space, time, and resources needed to house and run the servers and applications that allow us to march endlessly into these new digital-virtual frontiers, and to seek these infinitudes.

In this studio, we will push back against this paradigm by embracing a counter-practice of limitation, boundary, and constraint. We will explore a weekly series of movements, practices, and ideas that privilege these tactics and aesthetics of restriction: American minimalism, Japanese wabi-sabi, French oulipo, and more. We will bring their philosophies, strategies, and techniques into a digital context, and consider what they have to offer our approach to — and our understanding of — our virtual environment and interactive design practices.

Through a regular stream of playful, practice-based prompts, you will build up a body of work that includes minimal navigable environments, small-scale interactives, generative environments and sculptures, microgames, and more. Content will be delivered in Unity and C#, but those with knowledge of other software and languages are more than welcome. This studio will allow you to build up tangible coding, environment design, and interactive design skills, enrich your digital design toolset and vocabulary, and enable you to isolate, explore, and cultivate the key elements of your specific environments and interactive practice.

Calm Light: Designing for Pain Management

Chronic pain exerts an enormous personal and economic burden, affecting more than 30% of people worldwide. In recent years, digital media applications using sound, real-time platforms, VR, online applications, and games are being used in clinic and care settings to support pain management through focus, attention setting, emotion, and distraction.

This studio will help you develop ways for applying digital media for pain management, through calm technologies and biophilic design. You will learn about methods being used to assist different kinds of users where pain or the anticipation of pain presents challenges to receiving care or day-to-day living. You will be introduced to current research, perspectives from industry experts, and real-world examples of applications using digital media technologies that are used to support pain management. A review of this field will also include a discussion of the many aspects of pain: how it is understood and monitored in a clinical context, how it is managed in care contexts, how it is received socially, how artists have been informed by pain in their work, and how designers have addressed the health design challenges of pain.

An exploration of pain will also involve its opposite; an exploration of joy, delight, repose, and calm. To give you actionable tools to incorporate into your practice, we will look at biophilic methods and how they can be applied to your art and design practice. These methods are drawn from various aesthetic traditions and recent advances in cognitive science that help artists and designers with rich ways of thinking about human environments and user experience in diverse human-centered contexts.

If you wish to make immersive visual effects, motion graphics, game environments applied in non-entertainment contexts, installations, performances, or immersive applications, the tools you will develop in this studio will enhance your practice.

Composing Sound Spatially

Every perception of sound involves a positioning of it – whether in a city street or a movie theatre or a bedroom, around our ears, or in our bones. When artists, technicians, composers and producers of audio work with sound in space, what opportunities and decisions about its meaning, purpose and aesthetics do they face? How can we develop our own creative, critical and pragmatic approaches to spatialised sound?

Whether it’s in sound for screen, for games or galleries or performance or podcasts, spatialised sound can help you tell a story or communicate an experience. In this studio, we’ll explore different ways of composing and presenting sound in three dimensions, and develop techniques for adapting compositions between multi-channel, stereo and headphone listening.

From ambisonic to binaural and installation to interactive, you’ll devise your own project while growing your skills and knowledge of spatial sound concepts, with a focus on real-world applications.

Students will be encouraged to identify their own interests and pursue them alongside contextual and conceptual study of spatial listening. You’ll need to have basic audio editing skills in the digital audio workstation software of your choice, and a willingness to read, listen, work in your own time and contribute to shared critical discussions.

Heightened Multisensory Experiences

This studio explores the psychophysiology of enriched user experience – how multisensory experimentation can inspire and inform the design of heightened emotional and physically visceral states. Whilst dynamic examples can be found contemporary art, many of these principles are equally applicable in expanded cinema, rides, games, industrial design and the wellness industries.

Choosing from a range of specialized tools, including the audiovisual system in the Capitol theatre and haptic devices, students will experiment with sound in relation to concrete image, abstract light, video, physical motion, perceived movement, vibration, even scent.

A range of projects will be offered to both sonic and visual students and multidisciplinary collaboration is encouraged. Beyond the classroom, these also include the opportunity to work with hospitals, choreographers, theatre directors, film-makers, programmers and bands in order to apply an understanding of multisensory relationships when augmenting and amplifying audience/user experience.

In addition to both low-key studies and high-profile public artistic outcomes, HMsEx also offers research opportunities for students interested in exploring practical applications of these aesthetic skills. This includes research into binaural beats, brainwave entrainment, 4D cinema, motion sickness, wellness and dementia.

From open-ended experimentation to targeted application, HMsEx provides an opportunity to explore the expanded possibilities of rapidly intersecting technologies and the cutting edges of sensory integration.

Simulations and World Building

What is a world? In this studio you will research, learn, make, and critically examine world building as simulations of digital topographies and computers as world making machines. Computer worlds, akin to those of children’s make-believe, grant absolute power to whoever is imagining or programming them. You will dive into AI assisted design processes that lower technical barriers for creating complex, synthetic worlds while opening a space for greater creativity.

Drawing from shared fantasy, internet art, collaborative lore-building, virtual collages, generative and metaverse, and video games that play themselves, this studio will explore locative simulation by using Unity, C# and generative AI to meaningfully interrogate workflows and new methodologies.

Students will learn to identify simulated environments that respond to critical assessment of the medium by using design-centred approaches to place and space. These are further unpacked to invite students to create topographies beyond aesthetics to consider how such places can impact on sociability, connectivity, and identities as a digital whole.

The outcomes of the studio will be a significant world simulation that responds to critical dialogues of the studio and a learned awareness of the implications for people within and outside of designed locations and simulated
worlds.