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Failing with Style: Designing for Aesthetic Failure in Interactive Performance

Hazzard, Adrian; Greenhalgh, Chris; Kallionp��, Maria; Benford, Steve; Veinberg, Anne; Kanga, Zubin; McPherson, Andrew

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Authors

Maria Kallionp��

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STEVE BENFORD steve.benford@nottingham.ac.uk
Dunford Chair in Computer Science

Anne Veinberg

Zubin Kanga

Andrew McPherson



Abstract

Failure is a common artefact of challenging experiences, a fact of life for interactive systems but also a resource for aesthetic and improvisational performance. We present a study of how three professional pianists performed an interactive piano composition that included playing hidden codes within the music so as to control their path through the piece and trigger system actions. We reveal how apparent failures to play the codes occurred for diverse reasons including mistakes in their playing, limitations of the system, but also deliberate failures as a way of controlling the system, and how these failures provoked aesthetic and improvised responses from the performers. We propose that creative and performative interfaces should be designed to enable aesthetic failures and introduce a taxonomy that compares human approaches to failure with approaches to capable systems, revealing new creative design strategies of gaming, taming, riding and serving the system.

Citation

Hazzard, A., Greenhalgh, C., Kallionpää, M., Benford, S., Veinberg, A., Kanga, Z., & McPherson, A. (2019). Failing with Style: Designing for Aesthetic Failure in Interactive Performance. In CHI '19 Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Glasgow, Scotland UK — May 04 - 09, 2019 (1–14). https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300260

Conference Name CHI '19: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Conference Location Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Start Date May 4, 2019
End Date May 9, 2019
Acceptance Date Dec 10, 2018
Online Publication Date May 2, 2019
Publication Date May 2, 2019
Deposit Date Jan 14, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Pages 1–14
Book Title CHI '19 Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Glasgow, Scotland UK — May 04 - 09, 2019
Chapter Number Paper no. 30
ISBN 9781450359702
DOI https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300260
Keywords Musical performance; aesthetic failure; interactive systems; design; musical codes
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1466976
Publisher URL https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3290605.3300260
Related Public URLs https://sigchi.org/

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