TY - JOUR
T1 - Zoom Obscura: Counterfunctional Design for Video-Conferencing
AU - Elsden, Chris
AU - Chatting , David
AU - Duggan, Michael
AU - Dwyer, Andrew
AU - Thornton, Pip
N1 - Funding Information:
Many people worked to make the Zoom Obscura project possible, at a time of considerable uncertainty and stress due to the ongoing pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic. Firstly, we are grateful to all the artists who expressed interest in the project, and especially the seven artists who we were able to support and work with to produce the projects described in this paper. We would also like to thank our community partners Jack Nissan and Luci Holland, part of the Tinderbox Collective, and curator Hannah Redler Hawes, who provided platforms for the artists to share their work with new audiences. We especially thank Jessica Armstrong who helped produce the frst Zoom Obscura exhibition at the InSpace Gallery. Finally, we are very grateful to the Creative Informatics delivery team, in particular Kam Chan and Liam Upton, for their support throughout, in administering and promoting Zoom Obscura. Zoom Obscura was funded through an EPSRC Human-Data Interaction Network+ funding call on Ethics and Data: Concepts, Provocations and Solutions. The project was also supported by the AHRC Creative Informatics project (AH/S002782/1), part of the Creative Industries Clusters Programme.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Owner/Author.
PY - 2022/4/28
Y1 - 2022/4/28
N2 - This paper reports on Zoom Obscura – an artist-based design research project, responding to the ubiquity of video-conferencing as a technical and cultural phenomenon throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. As enterprise software, such as Zoom, rapidly came to mediate even the most personal and intimate interactions, we supported and collaborated with seven independent artists to explore technical and creative interventions in video-conferencing. Our call for participation sought critical interventions that would help users counter, and regain agency in regard to the various ways in which personal data is captured, transmitted and processed in video-conferencing tools. In this design study, we analyse post-hoc how each of the seven projects employed aspects of counterfunctional design to achieve these aims. Each project reveals different avenues and strategies for counterfunctionality in video-conferencing software, as well as opportunities to design critically towards interactions and experiences that challenge existing norms and expectations around these platforms.
AB - This paper reports on Zoom Obscura – an artist-based design research project, responding to the ubiquity of video-conferencing as a technical and cultural phenomenon throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. As enterprise software, such as Zoom, rapidly came to mediate even the most personal and intimate interactions, we supported and collaborated with seven independent artists to explore technical and creative interventions in video-conferencing. Our call for participation sought critical interventions that would help users counter, and regain agency in regard to the various ways in which personal data is captured, transmitted and processed in video-conferencing tools. In this design study, we analyse post-hoc how each of the seven projects employed aspects of counterfunctional design to achieve these aims. Each project reveals different avenues and strategies for counterfunctionality in video-conferencing software, as well as opportunities to design critically towards interactions and experiences that challenge existing norms and expectations around these platforms.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85130511818&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3491102.3501973
DO - 10.1145/3491102.3501973
M3 - Article
JO - CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI' 22)
JF - CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI' 22)
ER -