Designing the Spectator Experience

Interaction is increasingly a public affair, taking place in our theatres, galleries, museums, exhibitions and on the city streets. This raises a new design challenge for HCI, questioning how a performer s interaction with a computer experienced is by spectators. We examine examples from art, performance and exhibition design, comparing them according to the extent to which they hide, partially reveal, transform, reveal or even amplify a performerts manipulations. We also examine the effects of these manipulations including movements, gestures and utterances that take place around direct input and output. This comparison reveals four broad design strategies: `secretive,' where manipulations and effects are largely hidden; `expressive,' where they are revealed, enabling the spectator to fully appreciate the performer's interaction; `magical,' where effects are revealed but the manipulations that caused them are hidden; and finally `suspenseful,' where manipulations are apparent, but effects only get revealed when the spectator takes their turn.

The everyday life of the revolution: gender, violence and memory

The ‘heroic life’ or the life of the revolutionary is one that resists or even seeks to transcend the everyday and the ordinary. The ‘banal’ vulnerabilities of everyday life, however, continue to constitute the unseen, often unspoken background of such a heroic life. This article turns to women’s memories of everyday life spent ‘underground’ in the context of the late 1960s radical left Naxalbari movement of Bengal. Drawing upon recent published memoirs and my own field interviews with middle class female (and male) activists, I outline the ways in which revolutionary femininity was imagined and lived in the everyday life of this political movement. I focus, in particular, on the gendered and classed nature of political labour, the gendering of revolutionary space, and finally, the extent to which everyday life in the ‘underground’ was a site of vulnerability and powerlessness, especially for women. I also signal how these memories of interpersonal conflict and everyday violence tend to remain buried under a collective mythicisation of the ‘heroic life’.