Research in the wild via performance: Challenges, ethics and opportunities

Performance can be combined with interactive, online and immersive video as a way of conducting research in the wild. This affords the researcher opportunities to engage with participants in a way that can be surprisingly intimate, reactive to live intervention, and scaffolded by aesthetic content in order to shape how participants engage with the research context. It does, however, pose particular challenges with regards to evaluation practices, challenges which vary depending upon whether the researcher favours more traditional methods such as participant interviews, covert or overt observation or quantitative analysis, or whether s/he functions as a participant in the shared experience enabling him/her to explore the engagement in an autoethnographic, self-situated way. In this half-day workshop, we seek to bring together designers who use live performance in combination with video as a method for conducting HCI research. Through discussion and experience sharing we aim to tackle practical and logistic challenges, ethical quandaries, and evaluatory pitfalls when working in this way. By crafting and deploying a live performance intervention during the workshop, we will tease out nuances of understanding public performance research to better make sense of human-computer interaction in a wide range of contexts.