Innovations in Practice 26 February 2025
The event will feature three presentations followed by a panel discussion, providing an opportunity for you to discuss the presentations and ask questions.
Presentation 1 Live Audience Accessibility & Augmentation (‘LAAA’) Project(s)
A project exploring music festival audience’s perceptions of liveness, haptic dancefloors and haptic vests regarding accessibility, disability and neurodivergence.
The 16 million people who are d/Deaf, disabled or neurodiverse in the UK face challenges accessing live music events. Some mitigation may be provided by haptic technologies, which transform sound into felt vibration, by generating experiences that feel authentically ‘live’.
Four LAAA projects evaluated audience experiences of ‘live’ music performances, augmented with haptic technology while facilitating learning, knowledge exchange and outreach activity. The first LAAA events installed the BEAT BLOCKS haptic dancefloor and programmed DEAF RAVE DJ workshops to school groups including The Deaf Academy in May 2023. LAAA2F field tested haptic vests, at Boomtown Fair and the Deaf Rave Festival in 2023. LAAA2BB measured audience and policy maker perceptions of the haptic dancefloor, with colleagues from the University of Brighton, at Cheltenham Jazz Festival, Meltdown Festival and Tropical Pressure in 2024. LAAA2BB co-convened the Access to Music Conference, at Cheltenham Jazz Festival. LAAA3 delivered knowledge exchange and included Bellatrix performing with a haptic floor tile on stage. Multiple partners included: Beat Blocks, Deaf Rave, Attitude is Everything, providing in-conversation speakers and Cheltenham Festival Ltd, producing Access to Music Conference.
Nineteen Student Research Assistant roles supported field tests by collecting data and facilitating research activities. Student feedback was excellent, evidencing benefits from experiential, research-based learning, including developing employability skills and social capital. The surveys built on previous work in: Do you think ICT enhanced performances are really ‘live’ music? Ten student performers gained experience of performing to public audiences while over two hundred student audience members experienced the haptic technologies.
Presenter: Adrian Bossey, Falmouth University
Presentation 2: Case study showing how a Daoist pedagogy, positive uselessness, can help students open new paths for their futures.
In a previous paper published at the recent WCP in Rome, Luke Waller presented a case study looking at how he used a Daoist pedagogy in his teaching and the impact this has had on students.
Considering how this approach could impact students as they move into the post-university life, he set up a small student-led production studio to work with ALPKIT, a Nottingham based outdoor clothing company that prides itself on being a high scoring BCorp member.
ALPKIT works very closely with its community to try to bring positivity and enrich society. The goal was to work with the students to help them not only build a studio which embodied the idea of ‘positive usefulness’, but also to highlight the positive work ALPKIT is doing.
Instead of being ‘useful’ – working to simply earn money by creating something a client would assume an illustrator would do – they will use the power of storytelling to create a narrative that looks beyond simply selling more products, focusing on ALPKIT Foundations – the part of the company which supports charities and initiatives which give back to society. The aim was to show students how they could stay true to their ideals in a commercial setting.
The students involved in the project now have experience in not only setting up a production company from scratch, but one with an embedded philosophy, which enables them to consider their needs as people as well as creating meaningful stories.
Presenter: Luke Waller, Nottingham Trent University
Presentation 3: Using creative technologies and design thinking to develop engaging practical sessions
A project using opensource software to create custom debossing tools for book binding, part of a partnership between DMU and the Worshipful Company of Leather Sellers.
As product designers, we utilise a large amount of subject specific software to develop designs. Over the last couple of years Nick Rowan and Emma Drinkall have been investigating how they can encourage students not on their programmes to engage with design thinking through unlicenced / opensource software.
This presentation illustrates one strand of this work and viewers will be able to leave the session with the ability to create their own stamps / workshops for paper / leather.
Presenters Nick Rowan, De Montfort University and Emma Drinkall, UoN