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Welcome to the Sensing Gestures wiki! Here you can find both a discussion and process of developing the tool as well as some documentation on its major features.
This repository is part of a research-creation project around the design possibilities of alternative controllers and smartphones, started by Enric Llagostera for a directed study course supervised by Rilla Khaled.
Repositories are interesting objects for studying and documenting design projects, as their versioning capabilities allow for a changing perspective and engaging with different stages of design processes [2], while also allowing for creator’s own documentation and traces of the materials to be centered. Using tools like Gource, it is also possible to visualize the creative process pace and particular organization using time-compression: together with
In the context of game development and design, and in particular the making of alternative controllers, the question of the environments in which games exist is crucial, both during their creation and afterwards. Are they in closed environments? Do they exist as flexible objects or are there specific measures (such as DRM or business requirements) acting to stop the creative practices [1] around a game? How to account for and attend to the physical-digital mixed materiality of alternative controller projects? These are question I’ve engaged with in the Cook Your Way and gambi_abo projects, and the choice of documenting the different results of the how-not-to-use-a-phone project is informed by that previous experience.
The repository for the exploratory phase of the project is available here. In it, the different stages of the creation process are marked via commits and via logs that represent some of my ongoing reflections. From the works developed during that process, I separated them into specific repositories for sharing. Each of these repositories feature both the most recent versions of the software constructed as well as design discussions and process write-ups that situate the research-creation process and its questions. Here is a small summary of the three repos:
- Shellphone: the first experiment in the project, it focuses on design explorations around mapping sensors to different timescales and multimodal feedback, as well as slow and frictional play with smartphones.
- Sensing Gestures: a tool for combining smartphone sensors and gesture recognition algorithms to allow for messy and evocative input. It features a two-fold structure to support the needs of both prototyping and build stages, by changing the middleware layer that connects sensors to the application. It is the repo most closely structured towards usability and describing workflows and its possible use cases.
- Red Dirt: a narrative game about retracing paths and memories, using magnets to draw symbols that move the player across time and space. Its development happened simultaneously with Sensing Gestures, and it features less sensor-centric discussion but shows how the integration of different middleware, plugins and libraries is crucial for design moves.
In a few senses, it is not any different from other repositories. There is no clear set of characteristics, a litmus test of sorts. I perceive the research-creation aspect of it as a stance towards the creation of the objects of the design process and their documentation. This approach requires a stronger emphasis on process, in its incompleteness and stumbling nature instead of the normative and discrete design actions undertaken. It also needs to account for context and its relation to a critical discourse and other knowledge around its research questions. The effort of reflecting through the creative actions goes through situating decisions and inquiries in terms of previous work of others, and positioning is key.
Structuring research around repositories is a design move itself, one that can be fundamental in answering research questions posed. Similarly to how a game is not finished when it is launched or made available, the same can be said to research processes. By scaffolding it as a launching pad, like repositories often are, a wider community is invited to engage with this effort. If a repository continues and extends the existence of the research results and decisions, it can also extend the knowledge building process. It can invite in other contributors and stakeholders. I’m particularly interested in how repositories also become hubs for communities of practice around specific topics or software, forming a concrete (and constantly rebuilt) point of reference for people involved.
Finally, using repositories hosted and available through the web is also closely linked with bringing research-creation to environments that attend to issues of ownership, use, archiving. There is no automatic contagious from being closer to free or open-source software to becoming freer or more open source research-creation, but it does place it a step closer in certain aspects. I specifically chose copyleft license for these repos in order to signal that engagement, but more importantly than the legalistic focus of licenses is thinking about governance and approachability. Creating a repository for research-creation helps me face and question the structure of my research, and specially when and how engage a wder community in it.
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Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux. 2017. Metagaming: Videogames and the Practice of Play. In Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames. University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, UNITED STATES, 1–22. Retrieved August 15, 2018 from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/concordia-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745543
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Rilla Khaled, Jonathan Lessard, and Pippin Barr. 2018. Documenting Trajectories in Design Space: A Methodology for Applied Game Design Research. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’18), 27:1–27:10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3235765.3235767