The DECIDE system (Rogers, Sharp & Preece 2011, p.456) was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the first practice project i.e. Determine the goals, Explore the questions, Choose the evaluation methods, Identify the practical issues,
Decide how to deal with the ethical issues. Evaluate, analyse, interpret, and present the data.
The goals for the research were developed to determine the degree to which the visitors to the installation could be seen as protagonists even when presented with limited control over the content in the installation.
1. To record and assess how the visitors made use of the installation.
2. To gain feedback on the construction, performance and practice of the installation.
3. To record any examples of the installation being repurposed.
4. To gain feedback in terms of how the installation could be further developed.
The questions developed from the above exploration of specific themes with emphasis on the presence of users/visitors are:
*What was their role? [General Research Question 1, 5] *What was their position? [General Research Question 2, 5] Did they change anything? [General Research Question 3] *Did they learn anything? [General Research Question 4]
*What did they make of the content? [General Research Question 3, 6] Did they leave with the content? [General Research Question 4]
*Did they repurpose the content? [General Research Question 3] *What message/s did they get? [General Research Question 6] What message/s did they take? [General Research Question 6]
For the first practice project, the focus was on the questions with an *. This was due to the installation not offering opportunities to change the content or take
the content away. Thus, the visitor’s role was delimited in terms of the requirement to be in the space and engage with the installation. Consequently, their position in relation to the installation was apparently passive: a “patient” mode.
Convenience sampling, following Nick Emmel, was the technique used to gather the data i.e. those that entered the exhibition room were asked to contribute (Emmel 2013). The content analysis of images approach, following Theo Van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt in their The Handbook of Visual Analysis, was adopted (Van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2014)
First practice project statistics:
31 people visited the installation (16 women, 15 men)
One person under 10, one person 11 -17, 29 people over 18. Seven questionnaires filled in
Six people photographed Two people videoed
T h e v i d e o i s h e l d a t : h t t p s : / / w w w. f a c e b o o k . c o m / g r o u p s / ParticipantsandProtagonists/
The original aim was to obtain a sample of a considerable size. This would have been possible if the installation had run over a three-month period as planned. The period of installation was constrained to two days. The justification of the validity of this short implementation was that the “Magic Mirror” was a prototype and thus seen as experimental. From this perspective the aim is not to provide complete findings but to provide indicators towards further work. Unfortunately, the lack of time meant that there could be no on-going adjustments to the first
practice project in response to feedback from the respondents. General findings are explored below.
One positive from the installation, although lacking in quantitative power due to the small number of respondents, was the unanimously positive response to the installation: “Very good”, “Entertaining and fun” - adds an interactive dimension to the exhibition”. This being the case despite the very limited form of interaction possible (cf. Appendix B for the full data).
The actions of the visitors were captured in the following pictures.
Figure22: Output from the Mad hatter’s Magic Mirror
The majority (27 people) stood in front of the mirror and let the action of the application play out. Indeed, as is shown, the most common attitude was either to simply stand and not move, Figure 23 or hold one’s arms either in front or behind Figure 24.
Figure 23: Output from the Mad Hatter’s Magic Mirror.
The video capture of two of the visitors is shown below.
Figure24: The woman formed a fist to try to affect the head.
Figure26: Finally, the woman placed her hand on her face and thus “deleted the head”.
Figure27: Her companion became interested in the fact that faces would appear in parts of the image that had no face i.e. the software was interpreting something in the image as a face. She then spent
several minutes moving her arms around in an attempt to create extra faces on the screen (see also Figure 28 below).
The former two pictures above, Figures 26 and 27, show the visitors adopting a passive pose in relation to the “Magic Mirror”. This extends to their hiding their arms behind them. This may reproduce the normal attitude that one might have in front of a mirror i.e. there is no expectation that moving around will change what is seen. Following van Leeuwan (2014, p.100) this is an example of “representational meaning” in that the data represents common ways of behaving in front of a mirror. Furthermore, the latency of the application meant that sudden movements could cause the heads to swop from person to person. Therefore, there was a feedback loop at work encouraging static examination of the output. A number of the comments regarding how the installation could be improved mentioned this latency as an issue. Conversely of the seven respondents who described what they did five said they moved around and two said they stood still, see Appendix B for questionnaire data. This variation 74
points to a problem of interpretation between representations. Indeed, it seems from the questionnaire that a larger percentage of people were experimenting with the installation than are represented in the photographs. However, this interpretation is provisional given the small number of respondents. Two visitors were witnessed acting out a scenario of “attacking” each other (not caught on camera). The two visitors are documented above. It may be that because one colleague decided to play with the mirror then that encouraged the other too. 75
However, they took different approaches. One woman tried to alter the output through various hand movements, the other attempted to make additional faces appear in unusual places: two different approaches to a “referee” mode playing with the rules of the installation. In the latter case no one had previously attempted this either over the two days of the installation or in previous demonstrations. These examples, analysed from an iconographical perspective
Note that the limited number of respondents obtained meant that full coding analysis was not
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possible, following Saldana, 2014. Hence a simple quantitative interpretation of the data is applied.
There is also the associated issue of the two women working under the “Hawthorne effect” of
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performing as they think they should (Gillespie 1991). See Appendix B for a discussion of the validity of this data.
(cf. van Leeuwan 2014, p101) indicate the stimulation of hand movements in a form of a dance, isolated in the video and screen-grabs, produce a qualitatively different form of output from those images that offer a static response to the installation. These movements are in the gallery but exist outside of the installation in part because they hide the effect of the installation e.g. a hand over the face removes the Alice character mask. This is playing with the rules in a similar way to those creating new content in the Body Movies installation i.e. outside of the prerequisites of the installation. There was not a high incidence of such a “referee” mode. Thus, this can only be described as indicators of protagonist behaviour with regards to the project and no more. 76
The application of Bishop’s terms of “authorship”, “activation” and “community” has limited traction with regard to the first practice project. The authorship is simply in terms of being a body for a head to be place upon. The activation is in terms of the move into the world of Alice, into the mirror (screen). The sense of community is very limited and only in the sense of the community of Alice characters. However, the examples of “referee” mode offers a different form of “authorship” in terms of playing with the scenario (“fighting” characters), deleting out the heads through various hand movements and playing with the interface to rewrite the position of the heads. 77