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ItemDesigning the Open Work World(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-04-27) Stricklin, Claire StellaSituated at the intersection of performance studies and game studies, this dissertation examines the shift in perspective between playing for one’s own entertainment and playing for the benefit of an outside audience. Its focus is in the genre of "actual play" — streamed or recorded audio / video programs featuring tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs) as a core component of their content. When taken in isolation, traditional TRPGs offer clear models of interaction for each participant, with game designers, game masters, and players exerting differing degrees of agency and authority over a shared narrative. With the addition of digital mediation, however, that established constellation shifts. This dissertation considers the various socio-technical elements that shape such a move, emphasizing the role of the audience in shaping performance as much as the players’ transformation into performers beyond the game’s magic circle. The three studies designed for this research include a corpus analysis of YouTube comments drawn from actual play audiences; a grounded theory exploration of the ways streamers change their habits and their gameplay for outside audiences; and a process of research through design that culminates in an experimental actual play using a mechanical audience proxy. Altogether, these efforts seek to reconfigure audience/performer relationships, open new avenues for game design, and situate actual play as a new site for experimentation and innovation between the producers and consumers of media.
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ItemDesigning Controllers for Collaborative Play(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-04-27) Truesdell, Erin J.K.Physical inputs are an integral part of the play-experience in digital games. Recent advances in technology and controller creation have led to a proliferation of a great variety of game controllers outside the console gamepad and mouse-and-keyboard paradigm. These alternative controllers offer a broad space of design opportunities and can be configured to support a wide variety of interaction types and amplify digital game mechanics. Alternative controllers are particularly well-suited to collaborative play contexts because they may be designed to take multiple or complementary inputs and thus support multiple simultaneous users. However, there are few resources specific to collaborative alternative controllers available to designers. My work applies cognitive approaches to human-computer interaction to play to generate a holistic understanding of the relationship between the physical affordances of controllers and the sense-making experiences of players. This allows for the generation of actionable design guidelines that take into account both physical design choices and players' social experiences and the establishment of a novel means of quantifying collaborative embodied gameplay. This dissertation includes four primary contributions: 1) the development of three themes and a taxonomy for collaborative alternative controllers; 2) the documented development of three boundary objects for the purpose of investigating players' sense-making processes with each; 3) the first use of creative sense-making analysis to describe and quantify goal-oriented embodied collaborative play; and 4) a series of design principles developed from an annotated portfolio of the boundary artifacts developed for this thesis and annotation of creative sense-making curves for each. In addition to contributing specifically to the field of alternative game controllers and design for collaborative play, this work contributes to research in games and play studies, tangible and embodied interaction design, and human-centered computing.
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ItemAfrofuturist Feminism: Reinserting Blackness, Queerness, and Disabilities in the Design Process(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-12-09) Bosley, Brooke F.In 2020, the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, Brayla Stone, and other Black lives lost to police brutality and COVID-19 reignited social protests across the United States and globally. These deaths magnified how white supremacy enacted violence toward Black communities, which shows up when people have biases toward marginalized groups. In response, companies such as Procter & Gamble, Ben & Jerry's, and even tech companies like Google, Amazon, and META released statements against police brutality. Tech companies promised fixes to algorithmic bias, shadowbanning, and diverse hiring practices. Technological solutions to these problems will not necessarily erase racial inequity; however, they can ultimately change how we build and create tools for marginalized communities for the better. We need principles that help designers, engineers, and researchers push for more equitable technology solutions centered around Blackness, Queerness, and Disabilities. This dissertation focuses on technology designers and researchers and how they build experiences that work for all marginalized people. I have developed Afrofuturist Feminism Principles to counter biases, violence, and trauma that technology design has enacted. My work is grounded at the intersection of Afrofuturism, Black Feminism, Race & Technology studies, and Human-Computer Interaction. The principles have been tested through co-design sessions with designers and non-designers around police brutality and COVID-19 that demonstrated the effectiveness of Afrofuturist Feminism Principles in tackling traumatic problems. I also interviewed researchers and designers to learn about the principles' challenges and opportunities. The goal of the dissertation is to understand how Afrofuturist Feminist principles could mitigate harm at the nexus of these issues and present a series of strategies on how to address these issues in design.
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ItemImagined Fortresses: Video Games as Language(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-05-03) Fiorilli, Patrick OliverThis dissertation argues that video games, as virtual worlds, are composed and experienced as language, and that they function as textual and philosophical machines essential to understanding virtuality, language, and finitude in today’s world. To this end, I describe how language manifests variously as material for video game design and play. In one regard, I argue that worlds emerge from the prescription of certain linguistic limits: the nonsensical, the inexpressible, or the impossible. Far more than agency and immersion, delimitation within the constraints of a video game’s language world defines the act of play. “Can I jump up there? Can I pet this dog?” In these cases, either the language of the game world holds the answers to these questions, and it will reveal them in turn, or it takes the questions themselves to be meaningless. The ledge is too high. You see a dog, but you cannot pet her. Traversing these limits, players paradoxically attempt to use language to escape language. As part of my comparative method, I locate a literary precedent for this paradox in the fiction of Mallarmé, Borges, Lispector, and Calvino. Mirroring the theoretical preoccupations of their poststructuralist counterparts, these postmodern authors reveal the implication of language in compounding formal and material spheres. Thus, this dissertation concludes that video games are virtual worlds in language which reveal their own enclosure and explore the very nature of delimitation.
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ItemDesign for Public Librarianship(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-04-28) Kozubaev, SandjarThis doctoral thesis examines the present and futures of public librarians in the U.S. and the role this institution plays in community and civic life. The goal of the research is to answer the question: how might we design for public librarianship? First, I propose to describe and explain public librarianship through the lens of infrastructures and infrastructuring to help illuminate the breadth and diversity of the work of librarians. In doing so, I also uncover insights about the politics and experience of futures, specifically that futures are socio-material and emerge at different scales through infrastructural relations. Second, I propose a series of design provocations to suggest opportunities for design that supports public librarianship as infrastructuring. The primary contribution of this work is to the study and practice of civic and social design on the example of public librarianship. The secondary contribution is to the study and practice of futures.
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ItemSituated at a Distance: A Framework for Teaching Reflexive Inquiry through Digital Games(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-12-13) Anupam, AdityaAs science and technology (technoscience) grow increasingly complicit in systemic injustice, there is an urgent need for practitioners to conduct scientific inquiry as a reflexive process. Reflexivity in technoscience entails critically examining how one’s position in material, political, and cultural structures of practice relates to their process of scientific inquiry. For example, it can involve examining how one’s position as a researcher at a large for-profit corporation affects their framing of research problems. Teaching scientific inquiry as a reflexive process is necessary as it enables one to understand how values and assumptions permeate inquiry, and how one’s positionality can embody or transform them. However, teaching it is also a paradoxical challenge: it requires students to be positioned in the structures of practice, while also at a distance from them. Being positioned in practice is necessary because the structures of practice differ significantly from those of education. Simultaneously, being at a distance is also necessary because those structures can bind one’s understanding of a problem according to shared cultural norms. This raises two research problems: How do we design educational environments that position students in practice, at a distance? How can these environments support inquiry as a reflexive process? This dissertation makes two primary contributions towards addressing these research problems. First, I draw upon feminist STS and pragmatist scholarship to propose a framework that brings one’s positionality in structures of distribution, power, and culture into relation with the process of inquiry. The framework explores positionality in four ways: as one’s means, status, culture, and experience and brings them into relation to three interdependent processes of inquiry: problematizing, hypothesizing-experimenting, and resolving. By providing a systematic means of examining positionality and inquiry, the framework lays the grounds to analyze and develop responses to each question. This, I hypothesize, allows it to function both as an analytical tool to examine educational environments as well as a design space for educational environments that aim to teach scientific inquiry. Second, I hypothesize that digital games can approach these research questions because they can simulate the structures of practice, one’s position in them, and the processes of inquiry as they relate to those positions, all at a distance from real practice. I investigate this potential of digital games by using the framework to conduct case studies and design-based inquiry into multiple digital games. This process demonstrated how the framework can be a source of design possibilities for approaching the two research questions. Simultaneously, it also surfaced key strengths and constraints of digital games as environments to support inquiry as a reflexive process. Particularly, I highlight how the procedural, evaluative, and artificial affordances of digital games can support but also constrain them from teaching scientific inquiry as a reflexive process (as stand-alone environments), and how such games can be complemented.
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ItemDesigning Women: Learning from Feminist Legacies and the Women-In-Games Movement(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-07-29) Schoemann, SarahIn 2019 the video games industry was rocked by a slew of high-profile sexual harassment and assault allegations that some called the #MeToo movement of the games world, but to many these revelations came as no surprise. From the 2004 EA Spouse controversy to the 2014 #Gamergate harassment campaign the games industry has long been known for harboring an at times toxic atmosphere of exploitation and discrimination. This project looks at a handful of Women-In-Games organizations that set out to change the experience of women in the industry by helping newcomers to gain high tech skills and to supporting early career professionals through mentorship and community building. Along the way, it combines the study of these Women-In-Games organizations with a years-long collaboration bringing video games to the US' oldest feminist bookstore, Charis Books & More in Atlanta, GA. Through examining the work and values of two types of organizations devoted to women's equality, one a historic feminist movement-building space and the others, contemporary interventions into the professional games and tech industry, this study asks the questions "What can the Women-In-Games movement learn from the rich history of feminist organizing at spaces like Charis?" "Can games play a part in feminist movement building?" and "What does the future of feminist organizing look like in the games industry?”
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ItemBEYOND LOCAL AND GLOBAL: UNPACKING THE MISSING MIDDLE IN ENVIRONMENTAL SENSING CYBERINFRASTRUCTURES(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-05-01) Ntabathia, Jude MwendaToday, when our time’s most important issues are framed as either local, global, or some combination of the two, what is the enduring importance of scale? Scholars within environmental humanities and science and technology studies have made calls to move away from local versus global dichotomies. This dissertation explores scale in infrastructures as they occur when resolving tensions between local and global, short- and long-term. Specifically, it addresses the concerns of scalar dichotomies, arguing that infrastructures entail much more than resolving tensions between the aforementioned scalar polarities. Through this dissertation, I employ ethnographic methods to illuminate the role of scale and scaling in the development of a low-power sea level sensing network on the South-Eastern coast of the United States. My research shows how infrastructures work across scalar dimensions of space, time, and human involvement. On the matter of space, I demonstrate spatial embedding as a scaling strategy where the project scales up by connecting to already existing structures, for example, when sensors are affixed to bridges and piers. Along the temporal dimension, I illustrate how linking the short- to the long-term is a form of scaling. I utilize rhythmanalysis to show how long-term rhythms such as climate change become linked to short-term issues, such as emergency response. I end by unpacking what it means to scale a human infrastructure, highlighting the contextual implications of adding another person or institution. I hope this work provides a framework through which researchers within infrastructure studies and related areas can attend to the missing middle, which contains a plurality of scales.
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ItemAll data are human: The human infrastructure of civic data(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-07-27) Peer, Firaz AhmedThis dissertation is grounded in issues related to the publicizing of data, which include issues of equitable access, interpretation and use. By engaging with scholarship from Human Computer Interaction and Science and Technology Studies, I contribute to a better understand of the local values and infrastructural arrangements that are required to build, use and maintain equitable data infrastructures that would enable marginalized communities to benefit from the publicizing of data through dashboards. I do this by taking a participatory design based anthropological approach in which I collaborate with local community leaders in order to foreground their needs and values when reimagining their civic data infrastructure. Doing so led me to identify the key elements of the human infrastructure that need to be considered when designing civic data infrastructures with resource constrained communities. Bringing these elements of the human infrastructure together and reflecting on how my role as a design researcher changed during the scope of this project, I argue that all data are human, and the way we do justice to them is by identifying and building relationships between the human elements of the civic data infrastructures that we are trying to build. This implies that we focus on identifying the human actors that are crucial to these civic data infrastructures, strengthen their working relationships and prioritize their values and needs by including them in our infrastructuring efforts. I hope this dissertation helps researchers and practitioners move beyond the mere publicizing of data as a strategy for data equity, but instead think about realigning the human elements of the underlying data infrastructure in order to empower communities.
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ItemRisk and expression: Physical and material risk states in computational music practices(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-05-17) Weisling, AnnaThis research investigates qualities of physical and material risk within musical performance practices and the value that such properties may hold for less physical engagements afforded by computational instruments. The two studies designed for this research draw upon the experiences of practitioners directly, allowing them to speak about their creative processes, values, and priorities, and how risk and expressivity might factor into their practice. Through comparative studies, artifact design, in-depth discussions, and the application of Thematic Analysis I am able to share the perceptions and experiences of practitioners as they themselves describe. By identifying the value that physical and material risk, uncertainty, and the potential for failure play in the creative process we can potentially provide a compelling argument for the importance of such qualities in practices which do not naturally engage with them. Designing for risk and assessing the experiences of practitioners within the field of experimental media performance will contribute to a better understanding of the value of physical and corporeal materials within digital practices and present potential guidelines for the creation and use of new instruments for creative musical expression.