Brigid Costello

The article reflects on the artist’s focus on rhythm, play, and the way that dynamic rhythms can create a vitality that encourages play. She creates installations where the audience interacts with something and a response is then generated by a computer so the artistic work emerges through the audiences’ interactions. An important aspect of working creatively with technology is having an awareness of (and often resisting) the creative assumptions built into authoring tools.

Interactive artists are increasingly turning to formal audience evaluation as a way to develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between their art and its audience. In order to do this they will often need to engage with unfamiliar research traditions and respond to a wide range and great number of opinions about their work. This can make incorporating formal audience evaluation into artistic practice particularly problematic. This chapter will discuss my recent experience of applying formal audience evaluation methods within the process of creating an interactive artwork titled Just a Bit of Spin (2007). This process revealed strategies and understandings that might help other artists to more successfully incorporate audience evaluation into their own practice. For me, the key to this success lay in ensuring that the process was always driven by my artistic aims and focused on increasing opportunities for creative inspiration.

When users first encounter an interactive application, their personal rhythms need to synchronise with and become attuned to its rhythms. Any breakdown of rhythmic synchrony at this stage can leave users confused, distracted, frustrated or bored. Often, users can’t explain this breakdown, apart from having a sense that the application “just didn’t grab” them, and it can occur no matter how interesting the work’s content may be. At the other end of the scale, the rhythms of a work can grab users so fast that they feel as if they have been taken over and possessed. An experience they might then describe as addictive. The rhythms of a beginning lead users into the patterns within a work, guiding attention and developing expectations about how these patterns might then progress. Their flow has an energy that, when combined with a user’s rhythms, pulls the interactive experience ever onwards towards whatever it is to become. Beginnings sow the seeds not just for rhythmic progression but ...

Our ability to focus on and perceive rhythmic patterns, whether they involve aural, visual, tactile, kinaesthetic or any of our other senses, is a basic human skill that transcends culture and history. We all have a common ability to attend to rhythm yet our culture and its historical context has an impact on which rhythmic patterns we can perceive and produce with ease. The rhythmic traditions of the musical culture we are born into give us an internalised ruleset that makes it easy for us to hear any rhythm from our own musical culture, to play or dance along with it and to enjoy its emotional nuances. Ethnographic research suggests that these cultural rhythmic rulesets are not just musical. From birth, we become acclimatised to all kinds of rules and meanings in relation to rhythm, from the rhythms of walking down the street to the rhythms of social interaction. Developing an understanding of the impacts of cultural context on rhythmic experience is important for designers of int...

This paper describes a study into the situated experience of interactive art. The study was conducted with audiences of the artwork Iamascope and is framed by the four categories of embodied experience that have been proposed by its artist Sidney Fels. The video-cued recall method we employed was shown to reveal rich detail about situated interactive art experience. The results provide a detailed account of how the categories of embodiment manifest themselves in audience experience and lead to the proposal of a blueprint for the trajectory of interaction produced by Iamascope which may be generalisable to other interactive artworks.

All rhythms involve patterns of change and the way they transition between (or resolve the tensions between) the changing states has a felt quality. That felt quality will also emerge out of the rhythmic textures of densities, layers and accents within a work. Both textures and transitions contribute to the overall affective tone of a work and this makes them an essential component of the processes of designing for rhythmic experience. In order to create textures, designers will go through processes of addition, subtraction, sequencing, and layering. To create transitions, they will shape the ebb and flow of the dynamics of rhythm and, in particular, shape that moment when two rhythmic energies connect. Within interaction design, these two processes allow designers to create expressive rhythmic possibilities that can then be brought to life by the unfolding of a work and the playful interactions of its users. To begin our discussion of textures and transitions, we have an interview ...

Our journey into rhythm, play and interaction design has taken us along many interesting paths, each inspired by one of the eighteen creative practitioners interviewed for this book. Through the ideas of these creative practitioners, we have understood rhythm as something that shapes societies, cultures, thoughts, bodies, meanings and perceptions. We have also uncovered strategies for designing rhythms across all its dimensions and gained insights into the feelings rhythm can evoke when it is performed and perceived. Before finishing, we now have a short summary of the many rhythmic design strategies that have been uncovered. This summary cannot possibly express the full nuance of all that we have discussed nor the true vitality of each strategy, but it will act as a reminder of the detail covered in the previous chapters. The summary is divided into sections that address the three major themes of the book—strategies for creating dynamics, designing for expressive control and the pl...

Abstract Our discussion focuses on the design of creativity support systems. We describe a dedicated support system and the results of its evaluation. We then analyze a creative collaboration that was carried out without such a dedicated support system. We propose a new goal for designers of creativity support systems: facilitating creative presence. In addition, we describe four key aspects that such support systems should address: speed, status, synthesis and sketching.

ABSTRACT The use of threshold concepts to facilitate learner understanding is gaining traction in a variety of disciplines. Put simply, threshold concepts are tacit, abstract and troublesome knowledge that can act as a barrier to student mastery of a discipline. Through the process of understanding a threshold concept the student learns to “think like a practitioner” in their discipline. Our team of three game designers and researchers were asked to use information literacy threshold concepts to design an educational game that focused on the process of conducting a “literature review” for undergraduate engineering students. As this was our first experience designing with threshold concepts, we adopted a suitable methodology to both frame and capture our design process as one of research ⎯ Research-as-Design-Design-as-Research (RADDAR). The design process exposed issues relating to the integration of threshold concepts into our game design and lead us to revisit several of our initial design decisions and assumptions. These included the design being open versus closed, whether the game was to be facilitated or played independently, if it was to be online versus face-to-face, and the degree to which it was to be realistic versus abstracted. Through qualitative evaluations of player experience, we obtained valuable feedback about the interface, gameplay, and conceptual understanding of the game, which ultimately provided us with insight into the approach we needed to adopt. As a consequence, we offer some suggestions for design strategies to use when developing a game that aims to facilitate the understanding of threshold concepts.

This exploratory paper focuses on the rhythm of game interactions and the rhythmic experience of the player. The player’s experience of a rhythm involves patterns of attention that are formed through processes of entrainment and habituation. The player’s body both opens to a rhythm and is influenced by it. There are voluntary and involuntary, conscious and unconscious aspects to these processes and this paper explores the characteristics of these rhythmic dynamics within game experience. In discussing the range and complexity of the processes of rhythmic entrainment, the paper also suggests that this perspective might be useful for the design and analysis of serious games.

Interactive storytelling has been a topic of much debate for the past two decades. Many have foreseen exciting new works; while others have cast doubt on the whole endeavor. In terms of actual titles, most games express a familiar story of a hero triumphing against the odds in order to save the day. However, a number of recent titles have

Abstract This paper describes a study into the situated experience of interactive art. The study was conducted with audiences of the artwork Iamascope and is framed by the four categories of embodied experience that have been proposed by its artist Sidney Fels. The video-cued recall method we employed was shown to reveal rich detail about situated interactive art experience. The results provide a detailed account of how the categories of embodiment manifest themselves in audience experience and lead to the proposal of a ...

ABSTRACT Much has been written in recent times about game-based learning with the aim to bring together elements of game design and instructional design to make education more engaging. Sadly the results have been rather hit-and-miss and most educational games fail to either entertain or educate. Yet there are many entertaining computer games which exhibit all the characteristics of well-designed educational tools. Can these tools only be used to teach combat or dangerous driving? Or is there another reason why educational games fail where entertainment games succeed? Schell’s “Lens of the Toy” provides valuable insight into this problem. An engaging game is based around an interesting toy, something that is already fun to play with before goals, challenges and narratives are added. A good toy is a complex system with many affordances that engage cognitive abilities of pattern recognition, strategic reasoning and problem solving. In an educational game, we argue this toy should be a concrete model of the learning domain. Such a toy can support all the requirements Gee has set out for teaching “deep conceptual understanding”. Without such a toy at its core, educational games are likely to be little more that shallow, didactic, “skill-and-drill” exercises with a coating of irrelevant gameplay to make them palatable.

This report describes a user evaluation study that was conducted on three interactive artworks in December 2006 at the Creativity and Cognition Studios. The report outlines the study's methods and presents a detailed view of a sub-section of the results. ...

The structure of the look defines visual pleasure, as the relationship between the subject of the gaze and its object is based in the pleasure of control and consumption. The directing and direction of the look controls the desire, and hence the fulfillment, of the desire. Film theorists in the 1970s saw the look of the cinema as structured around the male gaze (Mulvey 1975), and Berger (1972) asserts that 'men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at'(p. 47), but later writers suggested that ...

ABSTRACT Much has been written in recent times about game-based learning with the aim to bring together elements of game design and instructional design to make education more engaging. Sadly the results have been rather hit-and-miss and most educational games fail to either entertain or educate. Yet there are many entertaining computer games which exhibit all the characteristics of well-designed educational tools. Can these tools only be used to teach combat or dangerous driving? Or is there another reason why educational games fail where entertainment games succeed? Schell’s “Lens of the Toy” provides valuable insight into this problem. An engaging game is based around an interesting toy, something that is already fun to play with before goals, challenges and narratives are added. A good toy is a complex system with many affordances that engage cognitive abilities of pattern recognition, strategic reasoning and problem solving. In an educational game, we argue this toy should be a concrete model of the learning domain. Such a toy can support all the requirements Gee has set out for teaching “deep conceptual understanding”. Without such a toy at its core, educational games are likely to be little more that shallow, didactic, “skill-and-drill” exercises with a coating of irrelevant gameplay to make them palatable.

To focus on rhythms within the lived relations between humans and technology is to focus on unfolding processes, dynamic temporality, and patterns of change and continuity. Rhythms infuse the political, the social, the personal and the technological. Through anticipation and expectation rhythms also point towards the future and its tendencies. Drawing inspiration from Rhythmanalysis, Somaesthetic Design and Entanglement HCI this paper explores methods for analysing rhythm within HCI and discusses the challenges of recording the ephemeral, articulating experience and understanding the non-human. Like rhythm, the methods outlined involve process, temporality and difference. There are the embodied practices of developing sensitivity, paying attention and thinking by doing. Then there are the representational practices of revealing through sound, working with moving images, shifting temporal scales and expressing dynamics graphically. These methods are presented as suggestions and tentative principles for ways of thinking with and through rhythm and aim to inspire further exploration.

Interviews with three dancers and three percussionists about performing, perceiving and composing rhythms are used to develop insights into ways that interaction designers might understand and shape the rhythmic experiences of their users. These insights coalesce around three themes: feeling your way into a rhythm, performing rhythms and the dance of synchrony. The article argues that a user’s experience of the rhythms within a design will play a significant role in its affective impact.

This study is focused on developing strategies for designing for improvisational play in educational serious games. In doing so, the aim is to create games that can educate in circumstances where the behaviors or knowledges being taught emerge or change over time. The study is based on interviews with nine creative practitioners whose practice centers on improvisation. An analysis of the interviews revealed four themes that together describe the key processes of improvisational play. Each theme involves a set of opposites in dialogue: freedom/constraint; predefined/emergent; certainty/ uncertainty; follower/ leader. These four themes, it is suggested, can be used as design lenses for designing an educational serious game that evokes improvisational play.

Abstract Our discussion focuses on the design of creativity support systems. We describe a dedicated support system and the results of its evaluation. We then analyze a creative collaboration that was carried out without such a dedicated support system. We propose a new goal for designers of creativity support systems: facilitating creative presence. In addition, we describe four key aspects that such support systems should address: speed, status, synthesis and sketching.

Interaction design embraces wide-ranging forms of design, including technical, biologi-cal, environmental and organizational sys-tems. In software design, the term encompasses the behaviour of a system in response to its users over time and involves all elements, objects and operations that ...

Based on Notes made at, and shortly after, the time of its production between 1972 and 1976, the project and the generative art emergent using an analogue medium will be described. This will serve to fill a gap in knowledge developing with the rapid ...

Our discussion focuses on the design of creativity support systems. We describe a dedicated support system and the results of its evaluation. We then analyze a creative collaboration that was carried out without such a dedicated support system. We propose a new goal for designers of creativity support systems: facilitating creative presence. In addition, we describe four key aspects that such support systems should address: speed, status, synthesis and sketching.

On adult video-conferencing sites, men present sexualized bodies as objects of the gaze through an interactive medium that enables, while it limits, the possibility of the passive and the feminine. Within this unstable subject/object framework, the men construct a masculine subjectivity and a male sexual identity. Male sexuality, through the medium of CU-SeeMe, is both an affirmational community performance and an individual erotic display. These sites combine established conventions of film and the evolving practices of ...

Working with 365 days of pollution data from Sydney, Australia, Blown Away traces the intersection between wind and pollution expressed as rhythms of light and dark within a 3-dimensional grid of cubes. Each day’s pollution particle count is represented by a cluster of cubes that fall from a point drawn from the daily wind direction. This process gradually destroys the grid structure and transforms a pristine white plane into a jagged dark landscape.
36-minute video installation. Produced in Unreal Engine 4 and created with the support of UNSW Australia and the Creativity and Cognition Studios, UTS.

Focuses on the rhythmic interrelationships between the sensing body and the sensing computer. Proposes that the term kinesthetic empathy provides a useful way of deepening our understanding of feedback and control rhythms. Keywords: Interaction Design, Kinesthetic Empathy, Rhythm, Vitality, Play, Interactive Art.

Interactive storytelling has been a topic of much debate for the past two decades. Many have foreseen exciting new works; while others have cast doubt on the whole endeavor. In terms of actual titles, most games express a familiar story of a hero triumphing against the odds in order to save the day. However, a number of recent titles have attempted to innovate. The Path is one such game. Rather than a tale of heroism, The Path is a tragedy of shattered innocence, powerfully told through play. The authors perform a close reading of this work and highlight the importance of the ludic contract between the player and the game. The authors distinguish two different contracts employed by the work, antagonistic and exploratory, which make different appeals and offer different rewards. The Path manipulates these contracts to lead the player into being both the architect of the tragedy and its helpless victim.

Encouraging audience engagement is a challenge that confronts all interactive artists. If an audience member does not interact or does so in a cursory manner, then it is unlikely that the artistic aims of an interactive artwork will be met. The research project under discussion here approached this challenge by focusing on play as a way to encourage both audience engagement and exploration. Using practice-based research methods the project aimed to develop design strategies for stimulating a play experience within an interactive art context.
The research process began with the creation of two interactive artworks and the development of a framework of thirteen characteristics of a play experience. These characteristics are: creation, exploration, discovery, difficulty, competition, danger, captivation, sensation, sympathy, simulation, fantasy, camaraderie and subversion. This play framework was then used during the creation processes of a third and fourth interactive artwork. Two subsequent evaluative case studies assessed the playful characters of these four artworks within an exhibition context. They also explored the usefulness of the play framework as a tool for both evaluation and design.
The findings from these case studies suggested that the play framework was indeed a useful tool for design. They also suggested three additional design strategies for evoking play experiences within an interactive art context. First, to work with patterns and ambiguity to create a rhythm between rule-based play and improvisational play; second, to use the relationship between action and representation to connect with the emotional and sensual memories of an audience; and finally, to use robustness and responsiveness to give an artwork a vital and playful character and make it an equal participant in the play experience.
The findings from the case studies also led to a greater understanding of techniques for installing playful interactive art. Exhibition signage was found to be important for creating an environment conducive to play and for shaping and directing a play experience. The studies also revealed audience play preferences for either puzzle solving or sense-making. An awareness of these preferences, it is suggested, could help exhibition designers to create an environment that will maintain the boundary of play.
Finally, the findings from the case studies led to a greater understanding of techniques for evaluating playful interactive art. The play framework was found to be useful during evaluation for collecting detailed data about play experiences and for developing a common language between artist and audience. The use of social pairs as participants was found to help reduce anxiety and encourage play. The sobering effect of evaluation anxiety was also reduced by using peers as participants and by giving participants some training in the practice of doing evaluations. Finally, in order to maintain the play spirit it was suggested that the experience of doing an evaluation needs to be designed to be playful itself.
These findings will be valuable for any artists and curators of interactive artworks that aim to evoke a play experience. They will also be of use to those within the general interaction design community, particularly designers focused on the creation, evaluation and exhibition of playful interactive systems.

Our discussion focuses on the design of creativity support systems. We describe a dedicated support system and the results of its evaluation. We then analyze a creative collaboration that was carried out without such a dedicated support system. We propose a new goal for designers of creativity support systems: facilitating creative presence. In addition, we describe four key aspects that such support systems should address: speed, status, synthesis and sketching.

To cite this article: Chesher, Chris and Costello, Brigid. Why Media Scholars Should Not Study Computer Games [online]. Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy, No. 110, Feb 2004: 5-9. Availability: <http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn= ...

Just a bit of Spin is a re-working of an early animation device known as a phenakistoscope.  Spinning the disc in this work also triggers animation but this animation is now driven by a computer and is accompanied by sound. The piece asks its audience to play with words taken from the speeches of Australian politicians. By spinning the disc back and forth the audience is able to mix new meanings from hackneyed political phrases.  The work invites its audience to reflect on the spin politicians put on simple words, particularly those that politicians use to characterise themselves and, often by extension, us as a nation.

The visuals in Just a bit of Spin are inspired partly by poker machines and partly by the cinematic tradition of using inanimate objects like fruit to represent censored ideas (think of kissing in Bollywood films or politics in Suharto era Indonesian films).  Poker machines are used here as a symbol of a political climate that values economic returns much more highly than social returns. Their iconography may also suggest an analogy between the poker machine’s false promise of “winnings” and politician’s promises of a “better life” for us if they are elected.

Two versions of this work have been exhibited:
Costello, B., (2007-8) Just a Bit of Spin, interactive installation, solo exhibition, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia.

Costello, B., Just a Bit of Spin, interactive installation, group show, Image Ecologies exhibition, UTS Tower Foyer, 25 June - 9 August 2009.

Part toy, part musical instrument, the Sprung! interactive was created in 2004 while Brigid was a visiting researcher at the Nishimoto Laboratory in the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The work was produced in collaboration with animator and sound designer Alastair Macinnes. A large screen presents participants with a cartoon style urban wasteland depicting three large coil springs standing amongst puddles of water. The interface uses the physical weight of participants standing on three pressure sensitive floor pads to animate three coil springs that produce bubbles. As the bubbles land they create a ripple on the pool’s surface and pop producing a musical tone that is based on a Japanese pentatonic scale.

Exhibited at:
Costello, B., McInnes, A. (2004) Sprung!, interactive installation, group exhibition, Graphite04, Singapore.
Costello, B., (2005) Play @ Betaspace, interactive installation, group exhibition, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia.

Elysian Fields (2004) is an interactive artwork by Brigid Costello and Ian Gwilt, with sound by Dave Burraston. The work consists of an animated windswept field of abstract grass that covers an entire wall-sized screen. Moving towards the screen the participant becomes aware that their physical action of walking in the installation space is being translated into the virtual space, through the animated trampling of grass and the triggering of sound effects. Materials: Projected interactive audio-visual computer application and footstep sensors.

Exhibited at:
Costello, B., Gwilt I., (2005) Elysian Fields presented at the Interactive Entertainment conference 2005.

There are rhythms of action and response to all human-computer interactions. As we click, swipe, tap and sway to their beats, these rhythms intersect with the rhythms of our everyday lives. Perhaps they synchronize, perhaps they disrupt each other or maybe they dance together. Whatever their impact our experience of these rhythms will colour our experience of an interaction design. In playful interactive applications, rhythm is especially crucial because of the role it performs in building and maintaining the precarious spirit of play. Play involves movement and this movement has a rhythm that drives the experience. But what is the character of these rhythms of play and how can they be used in the design of interactive applications? These questions are the focus of this book.
Drawing on traditions of rhythmic design practice in dance, performance, music and architecture, this book reveals key insights into practical strategies for designing playful rhythmic experience. With playful experiences now being incorporated into almost every type of computer application, interaction design practitioners and researchers need to develop a deeper understanding of the specific character of rhythms within play. 
Written from a designer's perspective, with interviews from leading creative artists and interaction design practitioners, Rhythm, Play and Interaction Design will help practitioners, researchers and students understand, evaluate and create rhythmic experiences.