About Face Interface: Creative Engagement in New Media Arts and HCI

As a blue-haired lady on rollerblades wearing a long dress with an imprint of a Chinese painting on it, I take great joy in expressing myself. One of my ideas is to take my thousands of digital pictures and print them onto my clothes and other material objects to share the stories of my life. I have always articulated my life not only through my words but also through my style and artistic creations, such as in my appearance, my dance, and my many other forms of expression. Growing up with a father who natively speaks Taiwanese and with a mother who natively speaks Cantonese from Vietnam, while I speak primarily English, I am accustomed to expressing myself in other, non-verbal modes to help me cross language barriers that I face in my daily life.

It is through my multicultural and artistic background that I have recognized my potential to creatively articulate the means by which people from different cultural backgrounds relate to each other. And with the rise of our digital culture, I find it imperative that we become even more open and aware of the opportunities for new forms of social connection and expression with the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and with the various digital media available to the public. I also find it imperative that a more interdisciplinary approach to research and academic studies be used to more holistically understand the various issues of interest. My early undergraduate training in Social Science Research Methods, Computer Science, and Digital Arts has provided me with a multidisciplinary foundation, which has become valuable in transitioning into a new interdisciplinary graduate program at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU). I am one of the two new PhD students in the Technology, Media, and Society program at the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) Institute. I plan to creatively integrate human-computer interaction, sociology, communication, digital arts, and disaster research for my doctoral degree.

Creativity needs to be increasingly emphasized and integrated into research and practice, as it inspires different people to come together and share their culture and experiences. Creativity is my passion; not only has my digital arts education broadened my artistic perspective, but I also continue to be surrounded by amazing artists that have been inspirational to my creative research endeavors. Throughout most of my life, I have captured my experiences by creating, collecting, and sharing a variety of ephemera – artwork, fliers, music, and other memorabilia of different times in my life including my digital photos, videos, and audio recordings. In these ways, I have always been an “armchair anthropologist” interested in capturing and exploring creative forms of human expression; yet, through my research training, I am turning this personal, amateur interest into a more rigorous, professional practice. My aim is to take a more holistic approach through my interdisciplinary endeavors and create innovative technologies that encourage people to be creators of their experiences fostering self-expression.

Therefore, this workshop is particularly relevant and engaging in terms of my current research endeavors because I am interested in exploring and developing new models for communication and interaction, particularly in the disaster research domain, by integrating media art and peer-to-peer communication technologies. My goal in attending this workshop is to develop creative visions for this research project in order to reach a broader audience. I want to explore how I can create a synergy between my academic research studies and the collaborative and participatory fieldwork I plan to conduct in my future research plans. I want to use creativity and media art as the medium in which to explore and engage my research participants as well as to communicate with the research community more creatively. I also want to discuss different theoretical frameworks for concepts of creative engagement to better understand and justify a more creative approach to research, especially in the HCI research community.