ABSTRACT Ubiquitous music (ubimus) frameworks imply a flexible approach to the design, implementation and deployment of networked resources, featuring characteristics that challenge current conceptual groundings of music-making. As a potentially unifying place-holder for post-2020 musical practices enabled by ubiquitous technologies, musical stuff presents specific potentialities and caveats. We discuss the requirements for ubimus technological designs and analyze the possibilities and problems of adopting ‘stuff’ as a theoretical construct for ubimus endeavours. Several case scenarios tied to specific qualities are described, addressing aspects such as volatility, antirivalry, semantic strategies and fluidity, targeting the deterritorialization of resources and the application of aesthetic pliability. We highlight the challenges presented by the disruptive tendencies of fast or socially brittle technological change, with particular attention to the monetization of network assets. Stuff is proposed as nonrival, genre-neutral and pliable material for the development of a community-oriented musical internet.

ABSTRACT Despite the increasing application of digital education in intangible cultural heritage (ICH), user acceptance of digital technology needs further investigation. In this study, a mobile AR system for ICH education was developed to understand user acceptance of digital technology. This study developed a conceptual model and hypotheses based on cultural awareness, generic learning outcomes (GLOs), and the technology acceptance model, aiming to construct an appropriate digital learning model for ICH. The results of the study indicated that the reliability and validity of the measurement model were satisfactory. In addition, the importance of external variables was confirmed. Cultural awareness and GLOs affected users’ perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. In addition, perceived usefulness and ease of use had a positive effect on attitudes toward the use, which in turn had a positive effect on behavioural intention to use.

ABSTRACT Social networks are important communication channel where individuals and emergency agencies can exchange information during disasters. The ability to detect disaster information or ‘reporting’ tweets would provide many advantages in disaster management during crowded events. This study explores Twitter behaviour during the Mina stampede tragedy in the 2015 Hajj by processing tweets posted over seven days during and after the incident (24–30 September 2015). Statistical features were derived from tweets, such as the number of hashtags, user mentions, and links, to provide an overview of the use of Twitter during this disaster. A classification model was built to filter reporting tweets using two Arabic natural language processing tools: Farasa and MADAMIRA. A support vector machine with a radial basis function kernel generated the best results in both tools (F-score: 88%–89%). The results will be useful to those who manage large, crowded events such as Hajj in Arabic-speaking regions.

ABSTRACT The pandemic restrictions and lockdowns have seen working from home (WFH) becoming a mundane practice. During the lockdowns, all movement were situated in the rhythms of the domestic and its infinite regresses of 'presence bleed' (Gregg [2011]. Work’s Intimacy. London: Polity.) – informal care of older parents and young children, the gendered nature of care work and its often invisible role as it convergences with uneven expectations around working from home (WFH) and home schooling. In June 2020 we developed an open call for responses to the Work, Care and Creativity Study (WCCS). The study sought to explore the lived experiences of primary carers who are also creative professionals working and caring from home (WCFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Deploying creative practice techniques which use prompts (such as photos, drawing and creative writing responses) to elicit participant’s experiences and emotions, this study sought to render visible some of the overlooked experiences, perceptions and practices emerging over the pandemic.

ABSTRACT This article examines how graphic designers’ innovations in web design revealed the potential and capabilities of interactivity as a communication experience tool. During the early World Wide Web (1995–2008), graphic designers’ practice-based contribution to interactivity enhanced how people experienced this new technological domain. Few designers contributed to the scholarly discussion of interactivity. The main academic fields that did—Human–Computer Interaction, Interaction Design and Communication Theory—disregarded graphic design's contribution, slowing knowledge production around the nature and potential of interactivity. The article compares the three fields’ main ideas about interactivity to an analysis of 47 websites from 2008. It argues that although the idea of interactivity emerged as a transdisciplinary phenomenon, graphic designers’ practical implementation of interactivity in web design through the development of qualities of intuitiveness, enablement, responsiveness, connectivity, intentionality and experience extended its conceptualization beyond technical standards, functionality and theorization.

ABSTRACT Latest work regarding personal informatics, gamification, and feedback has suggested that visualizing behavioural data for daily reflection should consider dynamic representations in metaphors and narratives with positively and negatively valued outcomes. Grounded in behavioural models from social psychology and embodied cognition theories, this article proposes a framework guiding the generation of animated parables wherein causality between a behaviour and its virtual outcomes is easy to understand. The guidelines include metaphorical mapping and blending the behaviour with a direct cause-effect scenario with similarities in embodied experiences. Application of the guidelines in a series of design workshops generates 47 parables. To evaluate the parables, metrics include naturalness of integrating with life routines, aesthetics of blending into environments, and ease of interpreting the causality. Evaluation results show that more embodied mapping and blending are more likely to result in understandable behaviour-outcome links. Designers can follow the guidelines and metrics to generate and compare ideas. Lastly, recommendations for crafting more embodied parables are provided.

ABSTRACT The paper focuses on the concept of technical word or technical text having similar meaning to the concept of technical image defined by the Czech media theorist Vilém Flusser, who described the change in visual media from traditional to mechanical, digital or technology dependent. To justify the possibility of a similar term in linguistic arts, the ideas about the involvement of various technical devices in (literary) writing are discussed. The paper begins with Ada Byron’s insights that meaning can be calculated. In addition, speed is discussed as a determinant of the characteristics of writing influenced by the mechanical algorithm-based typewriter along with a possibility to manipulate, which relates to writing on a computer. Finally, the paper presents the most recent version of technical literary words telling how natural languages are rejected as the main medium and programming languages are used as the sign systems.

ABSTRACTThis article documents and reflects upon a pedagogical project aimed at fostering critical engagements with technology in the context of a graduate research and learning laboratory at the nexus of computer science, design, engineering, and architecture. With the notions of critical technical practice and reflective practice as touchstones, the project links a specific tradition of twentieth century design pedagogy to critical sensibilities drawn from the field of science and technology studies (STS) in a space we call the ‘research studio.’ The methods and examples presented illustrate how this hybrid pedagogical model can cultivate the critical imagination of learners – their ability to place critical and sociohistorical reflection at the centre of creative technology design – and show that the fields of design and STS offer distinct but mutually enriching traditions of learning and research. The article offers insight to educators and researchers across STEM and humanities fields interested in engaging with technologies not merely as subjects but also as vehicles of scholarly and creative inquiry.

ABSTRACTThis paper builds on previous work into the development of a live improvising software system, Zamyatin, which is designed to perform in duets with improvising musicians. The research looks further into the issue of how performers conceptualise and approach working with the system. It takes the form of a detailed interview and analysis of the musical performance of one musician with the system, framed according to theoretical issues of the analysis and perception of agency, and the notion of how we approach different systems in the world according to Dennett's notion of ‘stances’ and principles of embodied cognition. The results of this study further support the idea that musicians maintain an ambiguous stance towards improvising software systems that do include concepts of autonomy, but do not depend on comparisons to human behaviour.

ABSTRACTThe new commercial-grade Electroencephalography (EEG)-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have led to a phenomenal development of applications across health, entertainment and the arts, while an increasing interest in multi-brain interaction has emerged. In the arts, there is already a number of works that involve the interaction of more than one participants with the use of EEG-based BCIs. However, the field of live brain-computer cinema and mixed-media performances is rather new, compared to installations and music performances that involve multi-brain BCIs. In this context, we present the particular challenges involved. We discuss Enheduanna – A Manifesto of Falling, the first demonstration of a live brain-computer cinema performance that enables the real-time brain-activity interaction of one performer and two audience members; and we take a cognitive perspective on the implementation of a new passive multi-brain EEG-based BCI system to realise our creative concept. This article also presents the preliminary results and future work.