Emergent participant interaction

Emergence has the potential to effect complex, creative or open-ended interactions and novel game-play. We report on research into an emergent interactive system. This investigates emergent user behaviors and experience through the creation and evaluation of an interactive system. The system is +-NOW, an augmented reality, tangible, interactive art system. The paper briefly describes the qualities of emergence and +-NOW before focusing on its evaluation. This was a qualitative study with 30 participants conducted in context. Data analysis followed Grounded Theory Methods. Coding schemes, induced from data and external literature are presented. Findings show that emergence occurred in over half of the participants. The nature of these emergent behaviors is discussed along with examples from the data. Other findings indicate that participants found interaction with the work satisfactory. Design strategies for facilitating satisfactory experience despite the often unpredictable character of emergence, are briefly reviewed and potential application areas for emergence are discussed.

Open in art, nature and emergence

The interactive art system +-now is modelled on the openness of the natural world. Emergent shapes constitute a novel method for facilitating this openness. With the art system as an example, the relationship between openness and emergence is discussed. Lastly, artist reflections from the creation of the work are presented. These describe the nature of open systems and how they may be created.

Exploration and reflection in interactive art : glass pond

Glass Pond is an interactive artwork designed to engender exploration and reflection through an intuitive, tangible interface and a simulation agent. It is being developed using iterative methods. A study has been conducted with the aim of illuminating user experience, interface, design, and performance issues.The paper describes the study methodology and process of data analysis including coding schemes for cognitive states and movements. Analysis reveals that exploration and reflection occurred as well as composing behaviours (unexpected). Results also show that participants interacted to varying degrees. Design discussion includes the artwork's (novel) interface and configuration.

Emergence and the art system ‘plus minus now’

Emergence is discussed in the context of a practice-based study of interactive art and a new taxonomy of emergence is proposed. The interactive art system ‘plus minus now’ is described and its relationship to emergence is discussed. ‘Plus minus now’ uses a novel method for instantiating emergent shapes. A preliminary investigation of this art system has been conducted and reveals the creation of temporal compositions by a participant. These temporal compositions and the emergent shapes are described using the taxonomy of emergence. Characteristics of emergent interactions and the implications of designing for them are discussed.

Emergence in interactive art

This thesis is concerned with creating and evaluating interactive art systems that facilitate emergent participant experiences. For the purposes of this research, interactive art is the computer based arts involving physical participation from the audience, while emergence is when a new form or concept appears that was not directly implied by the context from which it arose. This emergent ‘whole’ is more than a simple sum of its parts. The research aims to develop understanding of the nature of emergent experiences that might arise during participant interaction with interactive art systems. It also aims to understand the design issues surrounding the creation of these systems. The approach used is Practice-based, integrating practice, evaluation and theoretical research. Practice used methods from Reflection-in-action and Iterative design to create two interactive art systems: Glass Pond and +-now. Creation of +-now resulted in a novel method for instantiating emergent shapes. Both art works were also evaluated in exploratory studies. In addition, a main study with 30 participants was conducted on participant interaction with +-now. These sessions were video recorded and participants were interviewed about their experience. Recordings were transcribed and analysed using Grounded theory methods. Emergent participant experiences were identified and classified using a taxonomy of emergence in interactive art. This taxonomy draws on theoretical research. The outcomes of this Practice-based research are summarised as follows. Two interactive art systems, where the second work clearly facilitates emergent interaction, were created. Their creation involved the development of a novel method for instantiating emergent shapes and it informed aesthetic and design issues surrounding interactive art systems for emergence. A taxonomy of emergence in interactive art was also created. Other outcomes are the evaluation findings about participant experiences, including different types of emergence experienced and the coding schemes produced during data analysis.

Key concepts in creative industries

Creativity is an attribute of individual people, but also a feature of organizations like firms, cultural institutions and social networks. In the knowledge economy of today, creativity is of increasing value, for developing, emergent and advanced countries, and for competing cities. This book is the first to present an organized study of the key concepts that underlie and motivate the field of creative industries. Written by a world-leading team of experts, it presents readers with compact accounts of the history of terms, the debates and tensions associated with their usage, and examples of how they apply to the creative industries around the world. Crisp and relevant, this is an invaluable text for students of the creative industries across a range of disciplines, especially media, communication, economics, sociology, creative and performing arts and regional studies.

Confronting the shortage of skilled and professional workers : A large scale industry-school partnership initiative

In most of the advanced economies, students are losing interest in careers especially in engineering and related industries. Hence, western economies are confronting a critical skilled labour shortage in areas of technology, science and engineering. The aim of this paper is to document how the organisational and institutional elements of one industry-school partnerships initiative – The Gateway Schools Program - contribute to productive knowledge sharing and networking. In particular this paper focuses on an initiative of an Australian State government in response to a perceived crisis around the skills shortage in an economy transitioning from a localised to a global knowledge production economy. The Gateway Schools initiative signals the first sustained attempt in Australia to incorporate schools into production networks through strategic partnerships linking them to partner organisations at the industry level. We provide case examples of how four schools operationalise the partnerships with the mining and energy industries and how these partnerships as knowledge assets impact the delivery of curriculum and capacity building among teachers. A program theory approach to analysis, informed by theoretical perspectives of Bailey (1994), Bagnall (2007) and Walsh (2004) was adopted. Each of these theorists provides a related but different perspective on the establishment, purpose, and effectiveness respectively of partnerships. Our ultimate goal is to define those characteristics of successful partnerships that do contribute to enhanced interest and engagement by students in those careers that are currently experiencing critical shortages.

Challenging Mining Workforce Practices : Implications for Frontline Rural Communities

Global demand for minerals and energy products has fuelled Australia’s recent ‘resources boom’ and led to the rapid expansion of mining projects not solely in remote regions but increasingly in long-settled traditionally agriculture-dependent rural areas. Not only has this activity radically changed the economic geography of the nation but a fundamental shift has also occurred to accommodate the acceleration in industry labour demands. In particular, the rush to mine has seen the entrenchment of workforce arrangements largely dependent on fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) and drive–in, drive–out (DIDO) workers. This form of employment has been highly contentious in rural communities at the frontline of resource sector activities. In the context of structural sweeping changes, the selection of study locations informed by a range of indices of violence. Serendipitously we carried out fieldwork in communities undergoing rapid change as a result of expanding resource sector activities. The presence of large numbers of non-resident FIFO and DIDO workers was transforming these frontline communities. This chapter highlights some implications of these changes, drawing upon one particular location, which historically depended on agriculture but has undergone redefinition through mining.

A dynamic mapping of the UK's creative industries

This paper argues that, despite its strengths, the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) classification of the creative industries contains inconsistencies which need to be addressed to make it fully fit for purpose. It presents an improved methodology which retains the strengths of the DCMS's approach while addressing its deficiencies. We focus on creative intensity: the proportion of total employment within an industry that is engaged in creative occupations.

Teaching creatively, teaching for creativity : QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty Showcase Panel

In this panel, we showcase approaches to teaching for creativity in disciplines of the Media, Entertainment and Creative Arts School and the School of Design within the Creative Industries Faculty (CIF) at QUT. The Faculty is enormously diverse, with 4,000 students enrolled across a total of 20 disciplines. Creativity is a unifying concept in CIF, both as a graduate attribute, and as a key pedagogic principle. We take as our point of departure the assertion that it is not sufficient to assume that students of tertiary courses in creative disciplines are ‘naturally’ creative. Rather, teachers in higher education must embrace their roles as facilitators of development and learning for the creative workforce, including working to build creative capacity (Howkins, 2009). In so doing, we move away from Renaissance notions of creativity as an individual genius, a disposition or attribute which cannot be learned, towards a 21st century conceptualisation of creativity as highly collaborative, rhizomatic, and able to be developed through educational experiences (see, for instance, Robinson, 2006; Craft; 2001; McWilliam & Dawson, 2008). It has always been important for practitioners of the arts and design to be creative. Under the national innovation agenda (Bradley et al, 2008) and creative industries policy (e.g., Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2008; Office for the Arts, 2011), creativity has been identified as a key determinant of economic growth, and thus developing students’ creativity has now become core higher education business across all fields. Even within the arts and design, professionals are challenged to be creative in new ways, for new purposes, in different contexts, and using new digital tools and platforms. Teachers in creative disciplines may have much to offer to the rest of the higher education sector, in terms of designing and modelling innovative and best practice pedagogies for the development of student creative capability. Information and Communication Technologies such as mobile learning, game-based learning, collaborative online learning tools and immersive learning environments offer new avenues for creative learning, although analogue approaches may also have much to offer, and should not be discarded out of hand. Each panelist will present a case study of their own approach to teaching for creativity, and will address the following questions with respect to their case: 1. What conceptual view of creativity does the case reflect? 2. What pedagogical approaches are used, and why were these chosen? What are the roles of innovative learning approaches, including ICTs, if any? 3. How is creativity measured or assessed? How do students demonstrate creativity? We seek to identify commonalities and contrasts between and among the pedagogic case studies, and to answer the question: what can we learn about teaching creatively and teaching for creativity from CIF best practice?

Retrieving information from microblog using pattern mining and relevance feedback

Retrieving information from Twitter is always challenging due to its large volume, inconsistent writing and noise. Most existing information retrieval (IR) and text mining methods focus on term-based approach, but suffers from the problems of terms variation such as polysemy and synonymy. This problem deteriorates when such methods are applied on Twitter due to the length limit. Over the years, people have held the hypothesis that pattern-based methods should perform better than term-based methods as it provides more context, but limited studies have been conducted to support such hypothesis especially in Twitter. This paper presents an innovative framework to address the issue of performing IR in microblog. The proposed framework discover patterns in tweets as higher level feature to assign weight for low-level features (i.e. terms) based on their distributions in higher level features. We present the experiment results based on TREC11 microblog dataset and shows that our proposed approach significantly outperforms term-based methods Okapi BM25, TF-IDF and pattern based methods, using precision, recall and F measures.

Policy measures for creating an integrated and brand-focused innovation system for film industries in shadow nations : an application to Australia's national film industry

Shadow nations face particular problems in constructing competitive film industries. Shadow nations refer to nations whose relative competitiveness suffers from easy product substitutability by products initiated, produced and distributed by powerful actors, such as media conglomerates located in Hollywood. The dominant literature has so far neglected the developing policy recommendations for dealing explicitly with the challenges of shadow nations. This paper aims to develop and apply a normative model for the development of film industries in shadow nations. The model integrates insights from innovation system studies and place branding. The developed model is applied to the Australian film industry as Australia represents a typical shadow nation within the film industry.

Does weaker copyright mean stronger creative industries? Some lessons from China

We review the theory of intellectual property (IP) in the creative industries (CI) from the evolutionary economic perspective based on evidence from China. We argue that many current confusions and dysfunctions about IP can be traced to three widely overlooked aspects of the growth of knowledge context of IP in the CI: (1) the effect of globalization; (2) the dominating relative economic value of reuse of creative output over monopoly incentives to create input; and (3) the evolution of business models in response to institutional change. We conclude that a substantial weakening of copyright will, in theory, produce positive net public and private gain due to the evolutionary dynamics of all three dimensions.

Industry branding : attracting talent to weaker profile industries

There is global competition for engineering talent with some industries struggling to attract quality candidates. The ‘brands’ of industries and organisations are important elements in attracting talent in a competitive environment. Using brand equity and signalling theory, this paper reports a quantitative study examining factors that attract graduating engineers and technicians to engineering careers in a weak brand profile industry. The survey measures graduating engineers’ preferences for career benefits and their perceptions of the rail industry, which has identified a significant skilled labour shortfall. Knowledge of young engineers’ preferences for certain benefits and segmenting preferences can inform branding and communications strategies. The findings have implications for all industries and organisations, especially those with a weaker brand profile and issues with attracting talent.