arXiv subjects

Jocelyn Spence

Publications and source records attributed to Jocelyn Spence.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Creating a Mixed-Reality Installation with Families through Theatrical Co-Design

Co-designing with families for environmental sustainability relies on participatory imagination, yet habitual family roles and uneven participation, especially between adults and young children, often constrain it. A second challenge is continuity: workshop relationships and embodied ways of working do not easily survive into the final design, where artefacts travel more readily than roles or interactional dynamics. We report on a nationally toured mixed-reality installation developed through applied-theatre-led co-design with families. Across three workshops and user testing, applied theatre methods supported families to co-create narratives, artefacts, and interactional roles that shaped the public event. We show how theatrical co-design can rebalance child-adult participation through playful status shifts, and how selected workshop dynamics can be re-staged within a public mixed-reality installation. We contribute a theatrical account of participatory design in which designers work not only with artefacts and ideas, but with roles, rhythms, authority, and the social conditions that support collective imagination.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Devising Interactive Spaces: A Rehearsal-Oriented Tool for Creating Responsive Environments for Immersive Theatre

We present a rehearsal-oriented system for creating responsive built environments during theatre devising workshops. The system connects bespoke sensing modules for gesture, position, and speech recognition to light and sound outputs through a visual no-code programming layer. It was developed, used, and refined across six workshops with eight professional performance-makers, where participants created light-and-sound scores, gesture- and position-triggered scenes, responsive architectures, participatory prototypes, and a multi-room scratch performance. Rather than presenting a production-ready show-control platform, this demo focuses on how sensing and actuation can be made available as compositional materials during early-stage creative experimentation for immersive theatrical compositions. The system is designed to support quick configuration, visible mappings, and in-room testing, allowing performers to experiment with responsive spaces with minimal technical support. We describe the system architecture, its workshop use, and the practical conditions that helped integrate interactive sensing into embodied performance-making.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Directing Space: Rehearsing Architecture as Performer with Explainable AI

As AI systems increasingly become embedded in interactive and im-mersive artistic environments, artists and technologists are discovering new opportunities to engage with their interpretive and autonomous capacities as creative collaborators in live performance. The focus of this work-in-progress is on outlining conceptual and technical foundations under which performance-makers and interactive architecture can collaborate within rehearsal settings. It introduces a rehearsal-oriented prototype system for shaping and testing AI-mediated environments within creative practice. This approach treats interactive architecture as a performative agent that senses spatial behaviour and speech, interprets these signals through a large language model, and generates real-time environmental adaptations. Designed for deployment in physical performance spaces, the system employs virtual blueprints to support iterative experimentation and creative dialogue between artists and AI agents, using reasoning traces to inform architectural interaction design grounded in dramaturgical principles.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Devising Experiments with Interactive Environments

This paper reports a practice-based investigation into authoring responsive light and sound in immersive performance without writing code. A modular system couples live gesture, position, and speech inputs to scenographic outputs through a visual logic layer that performers can operate in rehearsal. Across six workshops with eight professional performance-makers, we staged a progression from parallel ensemble and technical training to integrated dramaturgy, culminating in a single-spectator scratch immersive performance with interactive elements. This paper details the system's building blocks and the workshop arc. A reflexive reading of workshop video logs, post-workshop focus groups, and facilitator notes surfaced three ensemble-level strategies that made the technology workable in a hybrid devising/design practice: rotating roles between operator, performer, and mediator; embracing controlled imperfection as a creative resource; and using technology-describing metaphors to support creative practice.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Sensitive Pictures: Emotional Interpretation in the Museum

Museums are interested in designing emotional visitor experiences to complement traditional interpretations. HCI is interested in the relationship between Affective Computing and Affective Interaction. We describe Sensitive Pictures, an emotional visitor experience co-created with the Munch art museum. Visitors choose emotions, locate associated paintings in the museum, experience an emotional story while viewing them, and self-report their response. A subsequent interview with a portrayal of the artist employs computer vision to estimate emotional responses from facial expressions. Visitors are given a souvenir postcard visualizing their emotional data. A study of 132 members of the public (39 interviewed) illuminates key themes: designing emotional provocations; capturing emotional responses; engaging visitors with their data; a tendency for them to align their views with the system's interpretation; and integrating these elements into emotional trajectories. We consider how Affective Computing can hold up a mirror to our emotions during Affective Interaction.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Producing Liveness: The Trials of Moving Folk Clubs Online During the Global Pandemic

The global pandemic has driven musicians online. We report an ethnographic account of how two traditional folk clubs with little previous interest in digital platforms transitioned to online experiences. They followed very different approaches: one adapted their existing singaround format to video conferencing while the other evolved a weekly community-produced, pre-recorded show that could be watched together. However, despite their successes, participants ultimately remained unable to sing in chorus due to network constraints. We draw on theories of liveness from performance studies to explain our findings, arguing that HCI might orientate itself to online liveness as being co-produced through rich participatory structures that dissolve traditional distinctions between live and recorded and performer and audience. We discuss how participants appropriated existing platforms to achieve this, but these in turn shaped their practices in unforeseen ways. We draw out implications for the design and deployment of future live performance platforms.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Playing games with Tito: Designing hybrid museum experiences for critical play

This article brings together two distinct, but related perspectives on playful museum experiences: Critical play and hybrid design. The article explores the challenges involved in combining these two perspectives, through the design of two hybrid museum experiences that aimed to facilitate critical play with/in the collections of the Museum of Yugoslavia and the highly contested heritage they represent. Based on reflections from the design process as well as feedback from test users we describe a series of challenges: Challenging the norms of visitor behaviour, challenging the role of the artefact, and challenging the curatorial authority. In conclusion we outline some possible design strategies to address these challenges.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Interpersonalizing Intimate Museum Experiences

We reflect on two museum visiting experiences that adopted the strategy of interpersonalization in which one visitor creates an experience for another. In the Gift app, visitors create personal mini-tours for specific others. In Never let me go, one visitor controls the experience of another by sending them remote instructions as they follow them around the museum. By reflecting on the design of these experiences and their deployment in museums we show how interpersonalization can deliver engaging social visits in which visitors make their own interpretations. We contrast the approach to previous research in customization and algorithmic personalization. We reveal how these experiences relied on intimacy between pairs of visitors but also between visitors and the museum. We propose that interpersonalization requires museums to step back to make space for interpretation, but that this then raises the challenge of how to reintroduce the museum's own perspective. Finally, we articulate strategies and challenges for applying this approach.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Visions, Values, and Videos: Revisiting Envisionings in Service of UbiComp Design for the Home

UbiComp has been envisioned to bring about a future dominated by calm computing technologies making our everyday lives ever more convenient. Yet the same vision has also attracted criticism for encouraging a solitary and passive lifestyle. The aim of this paper is to explore and elaborate these tensions further by examining the human values surrounding future domestic UbiComp solutions. Drawing on envisioning and contravisioning, we probe members of the public (N=28) through the presentation and focus group discussion of two contrasting animated video scenarios, where one is inspired by "calm" and the other by "engaging" visions of future UbiComp technology. By analysing the reasoning of our participants, we identify and elaborate a number of relevant values involved in balancing the two perspectives. In conclusion, we articulate practically applicable takeaways in the form of a set of key design questions and challenges.

cs.HC↗