Abstract

This paper is about the design of BYSTANDER, an immersive environment composed of image sequences of still photographs, texts and sound. BYSTANDER is designed for a largish (minimum three by four metres), darkened gallery or museum space with eight channels of sound and four large projection screens configured as a four-walled room. It is the latest work in a suite of multimedia artworks ‘Life After Wartime’ created since 1999 by Ross Gibson and Kate Richards, assisted by a production team that has included a graphic designer, a composer and several programmers. This paper examines the role traditional human-centred design methods played in the development of BYSTANDER and reflects on their usefulness in novel social and cultural contexts. Using the future experience of those visiting BYSTANDER to both focus and ground the design process provided a constantly available, alternative perspective to technology-driven priorities. Iterative evaluation of a range of mock-up prototypes has enabled the elimination, by design, of potential major usability problems before resources were committed to building the first working prototype of BYSTANDER itself. At the same time though, traditional methods of human-centred design, such as personas, user scenarios and various usability evaluation methods need to be extended to capture and explore the affective potential of immersive environments if they are to be useful tools to think with through the process of designing those environments

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Nov 17th, 12:00 AM

Human-Centred Design Issues for Immersive Media Spaces.

This paper is about the design of BYSTANDER, an immersive environment composed of image sequences of still photographs, texts and sound. BYSTANDER is designed for a largish (minimum three by four metres), darkened gallery or museum space with eight channels of sound and four large projection screens configured as a four-walled room. It is the latest work in a suite of multimedia artworks ‘Life After Wartime’ created since 1999 by Ross Gibson and Kate Richards, assisted by a production team that has included a graphic designer, a composer and several programmers. This paper examines the role traditional human-centred design methods played in the development of BYSTANDER and reflects on their usefulness in novel social and cultural contexts. Using the future experience of those visiting BYSTANDER to both focus and ground the design process provided a constantly available, alternative perspective to technology-driven priorities. Iterative evaluation of a range of mock-up prototypes has enabled the elimination, by design, of potential major usability problems before resources were committed to building the first working prototype of BYSTANDER itself. At the same time though, traditional methods of human-centred design, such as personas, user scenarios and various usability evaluation methods need to be extended to capture and explore the affective potential of immersive environments if they are to be useful tools to think with through the process of designing those environments

 

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