Relevant extracts from Lewis’ initial Expression of Interest and AHRC Cultural Engagement Fund proposal.
6. Project aims and fit with institutional strategy:
Please refer to the scheme details. The scheme seeks to support engagement and knowledge exchange between the university’s arts & humanities research and its wider cultural and civil milieu.
This project aims to:
- build upon and extend a doctoral PaR study investigating the interplay between sound and image within ‘Visual Music’ – by providing a ‘real-world’ opportunity to apply key principles identified through the research;
- support the broader skills development of the candidate – particularly in relation to developing insight into disabled culture, working with a new partner and supporting the wider impact of research;
- develop a new partnership with an established and respected provider of arts provision for the learning disabled;
- develop a collaborative project based on providing specialist consultancy in interactive digital art design and production;
- enhance the Level Centre’s remit to develop digital tools that enable users to connect with their environment through ‘autonomous’ multimedia and creative technologies;
- respond to key questions raised through the Level Centre’s existing ‘Inter-ACT + Re-ACT’ programme – “How might learning disabled adults engage with playful multi-media and multi-sensory environments embedded into the fabric of the space?” and “What unique benefits might this type of activity realise?”;
- help the Level Centre discover new ways of engaging with their users through artistic sensory environments that create opportunities for self-directed encounters and learning;
- contribute to an understanding of what is actually happening within this engagement process through the project findings and report.
8. Project objectives:
Please summarise the main objectives of the project, and what it aims to achieve. The report submitted at the end of the project should report against these.
Within the limitations of this short-term, full-time post the project objectives are to:
- prototype a bespoke, multi-sensory, interactive, digital art installation – to be located in the centre’s main performance space, a large square room with a central dome fully equipped with high specification video projection on four walls, sound, lighting and data services;
- realise more than just an immersive multi-sensory experience by creating a distinct art work with a purpose – a tool for individual audiovisual composition;
- adapt and apply a User Centred Design approach to the development of the installation – including significant user testing and analysis – informed through the Level Centre’s unique appreciation of the nature of learning disabled adult’s ‘usual’ engagement with interactive multimedia and creative technologies;
- document the iterative design process through an online project journal;
- collate data and produce video documentation of user interaction with the installation that could help support and supplement the personal intuitive feedback of Level Centre staff in how users engage with work of this type;
- analyse and assess the effectiveness of the design strategy to respond to the unique needs of Level Centre users;
- and produce a short summative project report.
While the development of the proposed installation will be challenging it can be successfully prototyped within the timeframe of the Cultural Engagement Fund project – although it will most likely not be fully completed. This iteration of the installation will feature most of the proposed functionality but lack the refinement and finesse of a final version – a typical stage in the process of interactive digital art design and production. However, this is an area of activity the Level Centre are keen to explore and its Director Andrew Williams has indicated that more funding could be raised to develop the work to completion.
Lewis’s multi-sensory focus and his insights into how this might be exploited artistically has potentially significant implications for the proposed digital installation – certainly affecting its outputs but more importantly, it’s inputs too. Overall, this should create a more sensorially immersive and engaging experience for Level Centre users. Moreover, it will have a significant impact on the design of the user interface – considering how adults with learning disabilities might most effectively interact with and control the work – by using feedback via multiple senses to ‘guide’ their interaction. Testing these ideas with Level Centre users through rapid prototypes, interpreting their level of reaction and engagement and trying to work out, in close consultation with Level Centre staff, who does what and why will drive an iterative design process that helps to consolidate and refine the user interface and installation overall.
9. Please provide details of the main development opportunities which the individual will derive from their involvement in the project, as well as any specific training that will be provided:
Lewis Sykes is a long-standing visual musician and technologist whose work investigates the relationship and interplay between sound and moving image. His multi-disciplinary, process-centred approach integrates creative coding, computer-aided manufacturing and DIY electrical engineering techniques to design, fabricate and craft audiovisual performance systems and gallery based interactive installations. Lewis draws upon established principles of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and User Centred Design but adapts and applies these with an artistic sensibility. In merging art, design and engineering in this way, his artistic practice can be seen as representative of a contemporary strain of “artist-engineers” exemplified by the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci.
The ability to both research, envisage and conceptualise as well as actually design, fabricate and craft a bespoke digital art installation that genuinely responds to the needs and requirements of Level Centre users is unique to Lewis’s skill set and research interests. Accordingly, this project provides an ideal development opportunity for him to provide specialist consultancy in this area and so be actively involved in knowledge exchange, support the wider impact of research, work with new partners and particularly to diversify his own engagement.
Through his Ph.D. investigation Lewis has become increasingly interested in multi-sensory perception – in how our senses integrate and recalibrate each other in order to help us best perceive the world around us. His research into contemporary neuroscience and sensory-centric philosophy not only developed an understanding of the limitations of a generally visuocentric art and design practice and discourse but also an appreciation of how a wider consideration of the senses – including but not limited to the ocular – can inform a deeper understanding of multi-sensory perceptual processes and their potential impact on art and design practice
Lewis has limited previous experience of working within provision for adults with learning disabilities, but is keen to develop his expertise in this area. Spending a significant proportion of the project at the Level Centre, getting first-hand experience of it’s facilities and programming, engaging with its users and staff and working in close consultation with and under the guidance of it’s Director Andrew Williams will develop his understanding of learning disabled culture and an appreciation of the Level Centre’s distinctive ethos of promoting the unique creativity of it’s users and developing their individual artistic language.
Lewis is keen to develop more practical, ‘real-world’ and ultimately commercial applications for his research – developing more immersive, interactive, multi-sensory environments – and the interfaces to control them – using a range of contemporary technologies. The outcomes of this project could inform future approaches to ‘accessibility’ – the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. Lewis believes that design which incorporates multi-sensory considerations from the outset could not only create a more accessible world, but ultimately, a better user experience for all.
Project timeline/plan (approximate):
February ’16 – fact finding, design brief, rapid prototyping, initial user testing
March ’16 – interface design and fabrication, output design and development, user testing, iterative design refinements, documentation
Late April ’16 – launch, summative report