RESEARCHERS

Lisa Gjedde is an associate professor of ICT, Media and Learning at the School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. in Narrative, Cognition and Communication from Roskilde University. Her research has been focused on the role of narrative in learning, the design of interactive and mobile learning environments, exploring tools for imaginative and creative learning and developing processual methods for exploring meaning making.

Bruno Ingemann is an associate professor of Communication studies at Roskilde University, Denmark and has been the head of the research group Centre for Visual Communication from 2002 to 2007. His research has been focused on three fields: Photography, focused on memory of the mirror and how readers relate to the surface of reality. Museology focusing on the reception and experience of the exhibition. Experimental reception studies focused on developing new methods of exploring the observed.

lg@dpu.dk

bruno@ruc.dk

THE WEBART_PROJECT: WebArt - Methods for Investigating Design and User Experience through a Reflexivity Lab

We assume that a work of WebArt is made manifest temporally, through the users' interactivity and use of several channels of processing the work. In order to retain the work as it is created temporally we have designed a project that uses a state-of-the-art usability lab to register the construction of the work of WebArt on video. And the again extend the dialogues into the methodology we call the ReflexivityLab.

The activity on the screen is captured on video by using a scan-converter, while a second camera is recording the informants' face and body expression. The two sources are mixed simultaneously so that a video is recorded which has the image of the screen as its main image and a video of the informants' expression inserted in a corner.
A facilitator is sitting next to the informant and enters into a dialogue with the informant about what she/he is seeing and associating with the work of WebArt. The other facilitator is sitting a different place and watching the activity and selecting central areas in the activity which can be interesting to go further into in the subsequent reflexivity interview. The encounter between the frame of possibilities of the work of WebArt and the frame of possibilities of the user has four different material expressions: the video, the facilitated dialogue, the interview on the work of art and the reflexivity interview which involves the informants reviewing the video made during her/his explorations of the work and art and reflections on it.

THE USERS are individually seeing and using three very different artworks where the movement of the body and hand closely related to the eye is of important. It is possible for the user to create the sound to in the picture and to change the appearance of the visual design.
In this project the user is alone in front of the computer screen but can communicate with on of the researchers about technical problems and more interesting about how the artwork related to the person-in-situation.

THE ANALYSIS of the top down of bottom up processes and the creation of narratives can be read in chapter 7:  The WebArt_Project: WebArt - Methods for Investigating Design and User Experience through a Reflexivity Lab, P. 135-152.