Design and evaluation of human-computer interfaces for expert creative interaction

数字艺术家、作曲家和音乐家形成了一类极端用户，他们对他们的系统的需求包括个人风格、情绪和表达意图的交流，他们愿意花费无数个小时来适应和习惯他们的工具(Mackay 2000)。如何最好地设计这些工具仍然是一个悬而未决的问题，因此本研究计划将解决两个主要问题，这两个问题将被并行研究：a)硬件和软件基础设施如何支持这种新系统的创建、探索和迭代开发；以及b)如何设计和评估数字系统和接口，以支持个人专家从业者的创造性实践？这些基础设施将不会区分设计师和最终用户，而是使用户能够不断地调整和重新设计他们的工具。第一个研究问题将探索模块化、开源软件原型工具的设计、使用和评估，这些工具建立在连接中间件libmapper(参见例如Malloch、Sclair和Wanderley 2014；2018)及其语言绑定和实用程序(如会话管理器、数据记录器和协议桥)的支持生态系统的基础上。该基地将用于调查工具，用于发现、理解和映射(连接)在大量流动传感器数据中发现的“有趣”信号；整合来自媒体间映射和脚本工具的概念，并在现场互动的背景下比较基于事件的编程表示和基于流的编程表示。对第二个主题的研究将利用现有的原型工具--以及研究主题1开发的工具--来创建和评估用于与数字系统进行创造性交互的新型人机接口的功能原型。这些界面将被调整为极端个性化，以满足相关艺术家(S)或创作者(S)的特殊需求。通过长时间创造性地使用界面进行的评估将比速度或人体工学效率等经验测量更受重视。

Digital artists, composers, and musicians form a class of extreme users whose demands of their systems include communication of personal style, mood, and expressive intent, and who are willing to spend countless hours both adapting and becoming accustomed to their tools (Mackay 2000). How to best design such tools is still an open question, and so this research program will address two main questions, which will be studied in parallel: a) how can hardware and software infrastructure support the creation, exploration and iterative development of such novel systems, and b) how to design and evaluate digital systems and interfaces for supporting creative practices by individual expert practitioners?. These infrastructures will not discriminate between designers and end-users, instead enabling users to continuously appropriate and redesign their tools. The first research question will explore the design, use and evaluation of modular, open--source software prototyping tools, building on the connectivity middleware libmapper (see e.g. Malloch, Sinclair, and Wanderley 2014; 2018) and its supporting ecosystem of language bindings and utilities such as session managers, data recorders, and protocol bridges. This base will be used to investigate tools for discovering, understanding and mapping (connecting) "interesting" signals found within large collections of streaming sensor data; integrating concepts from intermedia mapping and scripting tools, and comparing programming representations based on events to those based on streams in the context of live interactivity. Research on the second theme will make use of existing prototyping tools-and those developed by research theme 1 as they become available-to create and evaluate functional prototypes of novel human--computer interfaces for creative interaction with digital systems. These interfaces will be adapted for extreme personalisation to the idiosyncratic needs of the artist(s) or creator(s) involved. Evaluation through prolonged creative use of the interfaces will be valued more heavily than empirical measurements of e.g. speed or ergonomic efficiency.