Experience Together
A live visceral sense of dance performance across the internet
Led by
Jenny Roche (University of Limerick, Ireland)
Ruth Gibson (Coventry University, UK)
​
Contact
Jenny Roche <jenny.roche@ul.ie>
​
Funding
AHRC and IRC - UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Research Networking Grant
​
Status
Completed (May 2020–April 2021)
​
Summary
Dance is often reduced to its visual impact, particularly in mainstream performance contexts, when it takes place in proscenium arch theatres, for example. This impacts on how audiences engage with dance and how dance travels outside the live event through video. However, contemporary dance elicits multi-sensory modes of engagement beyond merely visual elements particularly when it moves away from narrative or representational structures. This can make it challenging to document or capture the various elements that contribute to a ‘live’ experience in dance and to circulate these beyond the live event. Building on a previous creative collaboration between the two principal investigators and others entitled Expanded Fields, this network brought together researchers from psychology, sociology and anthropology, media and entertainment, computing, choreographic practice, dance scholarship, dancers, musicians and designers to explore experiences of ‘liveness’ in dance and how to elicit these experiences through digital media. Using MPI as a key methodology to understand the qualities of experiencing live dance, the team focused on two case studies—a live dance piece reimagined for film, DÄ“mos by Liz Roche Company and a live VR performance, DAZZLE by Gibson/Martelli. MPI was used to uncover multiple perspectives on the experience of liveness and to inform discussion and workshop exchanges centering on the creative concerns of the two case studies. Another aim of this research was to explore sustainable possibilities for future touring of these pieces through digital and hybrid performances.
​
Outputs
Experience Together: Meet Space on Mozilla Hubs (project documentation).
​
Gibson, R., & Roche, J. (Accepted/In press). “And then again, I draw myself to the detail”: Capturing experiential states in contemporary dance making through Expanded Fields. Performance Research, 26(4), 71-77. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2021.2005955
The process of technical invention
Led by
Anne Remillieux (Mines-Telecom Institute, Telecom EM)
​
Contact
Anne Remillieux <anne.remillieux@free.fr>
​
Funding
Mines Telecom Institute and Telecom Foundation ("Futur et Ruptures" program)
​
Status
Completed (July–November 2011)
​
Summary
In a context of continuous technical innovation, psycho-social processes allowing the development of an innovative idea are of interest to many social scientists. But the process of invention, which is upstream of innovation, remains unknown: the often intuitive character of the emergence of an idea commonly leads to the hypothesis of an unconscious process, which is possibly explicable but not describable. The project consisted in putting this hypothesis to the test of the techniques of micro-phenomenological description: can we, thanks to them, bring to light the detailed unfolding of the experience that is associated with the emergence of a technical idea? Micro-phenomenological interviews with inventors made it possible to identify an iterative and recursive process, composed of creative macro-processes and micro-processes, and structured around the permanent oscillation between several levels of consciousness of the idea. The inventors notably describe two crucial types of know-how: knowing how to be attentive to one's own experience and knowing how to alternate between different modes of attention. These results sustain the reflections carried out in the domains of pedagogy and management of technical invention.
​
Publications
Remillieux A. (2014). Les coulisses d’une invention. Une description expérientielle du processus d’invention technique. Intellectica 61: 273-310.
Remillieux A. (2016). Invention technique et processus créatif : explicitation et modélisation. Techniques de l’ingénieur.
Attentional modes of pedestrians using a smartphone in the city
Led by
Anne Remillieux (CNRS i3 UMR 9217 Télécom ParisTech)
Béatrice Cahour (CNRS i3 UMR 9217 Télécom ParisTech)
​
Contact
Anne Remillieux <anne.remillieux@free.fr>
​
Funding
Instituts Carnot
​
Status
Completed (September–December 2011)
​
Summary
The use of smartphones while walking in the city can be a source of more or less serious collisions and raises the question of shared attention between several objects. A phenomenological approach of lived experience based on post-activity interviews allowed us to capture the attentional movements of pedestrians trying to interact with both the urban environment and a smartphone (writing/reading a SMS, calling, internet surfing...), as well as their feelings and behaviors. Our goal was to identify, in an exploratory study conducted with young adults, the dynamic allocation of attention between the activity on smartphone and the environment depending on context, as well as the risks taken, consciously or not, by these «connected pedestrians» and the possibly mobilized resources. Several types of attentional modes were identified: (1) a mode of attention simultaneously shared between environment and smartphone, (2) a shared and fragmented mode, (3) an absorbed mode and (4) a conflicting mode. Pedestrians alternate between those attentional modes depending on the urban context and the nature of what captures their attention on the smartphone. Among the mobilized resources, some are proactive, in particular when the pedestrians jointly anticipate their course and their use of the smartphone, or prefer giving a call rather than receiving it; others are reactive, for example when the pedestrians stop in a safe place for using the smartphone or when they struggle, with internal strategies, against their own tendency of feeling hurried or of focusing on the digital tool.
​
Publications
Remillieux A., Cahour B. (2016). Usage du smartphone par les jeunes en déplacement piéton urbain. Attention, conscience de la situation et risque. Rapport de recherche.
Managers overloaded by their emails: activity and lived experience
Led by
Béatrice Cahour (CNRS i3 UMR 9217 Telecom ParisTech)
Lisa Créno (CNRS i3 UMR 9217 Telecom ParisTech)
​
Contact
Béatrice Cahour <beatrice.cahour@telecom-paristech.fr>
​
Funding
Instituts Carnot
​
Status
Completed
​
Summary
Electronic mail overload increases the work intensification that is observed in companies. We studied the lived experience of managers who suffer from being overloaded by their emails. The powerful attraction of the email generates distraction, fragmented work, and more and more limited periods of reflection in favor of emergency work. A first-person approach raised awareness of these processes. How they read, classify and respond to emails have been analyzed and characterized. Differences on how these managers write emails are noticeable: some, not without some cognitive and temporal cost, are very cautious, prepare drafts first, and make numerous corrections; at the opposite, some are much less formal, they write rapid and short emails, not always very clear. Consequently, in interpersonal communication, some feel annoyed and threatened by an email that they judge as abrupt or elliptical, whereas the author is not aware that his/her writing is disturbing. Absence of shared rules concerning criteria of the message style results in these gaps which can create tensions. Other types of emails considered as “problematic” disturb and generate negative feelings (e.g. anger, threat, mistrust, stress): messages implying an urgent work, unclear messages requiring an interpretation work, aggressive messages, or messages with inadequate content. The study also highlighted the complementarity with second-person data (observations) and with subjective but not situated methodology (questionnaire).
​
Publications
Créno L. & Cahour B. (2016). Les cadres surchargés par leurs emails : déploiement de l’activité et expérience vécue, Revue @ctivités, 13-1.
Créno L. & Cahour B. (2015). Triangulation des méthodes pour une analyse écologique de l'expérience vécue de gestion des emails chez des cadres surchargés. Psychologie Française, vol.2, 129-144.
Car-pooling between strangers: from perceived risks to building of trust, what are the experiences of the users?
Led by
Lisa Créno (CNRS i3 UMR 9217 Telecom ParisTech)
Béatrice Cahour (CNRS i3 UMR 9217 Telecom ParisTech)
​
Contact
Béatrice Cahour <beatrice.cahour@telecom-paristech.fr>
​
Funding
VeDeCom, Institut de Transition Energétique
​
Status
Completed
​
Summary
Car-pooling is a mode of mobility which reduces pollution and traffic density; it is then valuable for the environment but it still represents only a tiny part of the transports used. A fist-person perspective allowed us to understand the comfortable and discomfortable elements of this type of service (Blablacar, Djump) where strangers get associated via a website to share a car for a long or short journey. Car-pooling users described in detail,thanks to micro-phenomenological Interviews (Vermersch 1994), lived situations of trust and mistrust, during all the phases of the car-pooling activity. The dynamics of the trust feeling, its nature, its sources in the situation of carpooling, and the resources used to install trust were analysed. A joint analysis of first-person data and of video data of the interactions during the ride indicates how complementary they are.
​
Publications
Créno, L. & Cahour, B. (2015). Choix en ligne d’un covoiturage : processus cognitivo-affectifs mobilisés pendant l’activité décisionnelle. Actes du Colloque EPIQUE 2015. Aix en Provence, France, 8-10 iuillet.
Créno, L. & Cahour, B. (2015). Perceived risks and trust experience in a service of Carpooling. 22nd ITS World Congress (Intelligent Transport Systems). Bordeaux, France, 5-9th October.
Créno L., Cahour B. (2014). Chronicles of lived experiences for studying the process of trust in carpooling. Proceedings ECCE 2014, European Conference in Cog. Ergonomics. Vienna, Austria, 1-3 sept.
Créno L. (2016). Covoiturer entre inconnus : des risques perçus à la construction de la confiance, panorama des expériences vécues des usagers, Thèse/PhD Télécom ParisTech, février 2016.