Failing with style: Designing for aesthetic failure in interactive performance

Adrian Hazzard, Chris Greenhalgh, Maria Elina KALLIONPÄÄ, Steve Benford, Anne Veinberg, Zubin Kanga, Andrew McPherson

Research output: Chapter in book/report/conference proceedingConference proceedingpeer-review

13 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Failure is a common artefact of challenging experiences, a fact of life for interactive systems but also a resource for aesthetic and improvisational performance. We present a study of how three professional pianists performed an interactive piano composition that included playing hidden codes within the music so as to control their path through the piece and trigger system actions. We reveal how apparent failures to play the codes occurred for diverse reasons including mistakes in their playing, limitations of the system, but also deliberate failures as a way of controlling the system, and how these failures provoked aesthetic and improvised responses from the performers. We propose that creative and performative interfaces should be designed to enable aesthetic failures and introduce a taxonomy that compares human approaches to failure with approaches to capable systems, revealing new creative design strategies of gaming, taming, riding and serving the system.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCHI 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
ISBN (Electronic)9781450359702
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 May 2019
Event2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2019 - Glasgow, United Kingdom
Duration: 4 May 20199 May 2019

Publication series

NameConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Conference

Conference2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityGlasgow
Period4/05/199/05/19

Scopus Subject Areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

User-Defined Keywords

  • Aesthetic failure
  • Design
  • Interactive systems
  • Musical codes
  • Musical performance

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