Live Participation

Abstract

Tools for supporting performer-audience interaction have been gaining increasing interest in HCI community recently. They encompass a wide range of systems from simple polls to live tweeting and backchannel chats. However, a lack of unifying conceptual framework hampers their efficient development and deployment in events. In this paper, we develop a notion of live participation and present a live participation system that aims to capture performer-audience interaction systems' salient design-relevant characteristics. With user studies, we identify central characteristics of live participation (RQ1) and explore the diversity of types of live participation situations (RQ2). The identified concepts-extended performance, integration work, and episodes-provide the groundwork for further design of live participation systems and more engaging audience interactions.

Augmenting the Performer–Audience Live Participation in Professional Event Productions

“…While event productions have been rarely studied academically, HCI studies on other kinds of events offer insights on which to build further research on. The most topical knowledge can be found from Nelimarkka et al 's [33] study on LP's three novel interaction possibilities that differ based on the control that performers vs. the audience have on the technology's use. "Performer-initiated & performer-controlled" systems include the already mentioned clickers that offer means for close-ended polls and their results' immediate summarisation on the screen [17,22].…”

“…Interactive technologies have been used to augment events for decades, starting from 1960s when the first clickers (i.e., handheld terminals where audience participates via button clicks) came to market and allowed the performers to gather responses from the audience via multiple-choice questions [17]. With the proliferation of mobile phones and laptops, the possibilities for computeraugmented performer-audience interactions-or live participation (LP; [25,31,33])-has become possible in almost any event. Live tweeting [26] and backchannel chats [49] are examples of rapidly proliferated technologies that have made use of this possibility.…”

Hybrid Events

“…Beyond meetings, seminars, workshops and conferences [9,14,15] and classrooms [6,5,4,8,24,23], technological augmentation of participation have been proposed to other contexts, including artistic performances [2,10] and sports events [10,21]. This shows that these ideas can be used in various contexts, which can only loosely be defined as events.…”

“…Remote collaborative work in small groups can become blended interaction if necessarily effort is put into the configuration of the equipment and spaces [1,19]. Similarly, performers can through their actions seek to integrate both channels to establish one shared performance [15]. These changes may require further facilitation from technologies.…”

“…Finally, the previous work of these systems and events does not often have a clear aim for system deployment. However, more recent scholarship has argued that systems can have scaffolding to invite different aims during an event and even focused on changing the use case for the systems during an event [15,23]. Through these stages, it becomes clear that attempts to participate using mediated technology are value-driven [17] and the values present should be further discussed.…”