Crafting Participation: designing ecologies, configuring experience

This article examines response to the interactive artwork ‘Deus Oculi’ designed by Cleverly, and in particular the ways in which the artwork serves to engender distinctive forms of co-participation and collaboration. It demonstrates how the artwork created opportunities for exploration and discovery involving playfulness, mutual engagement and the creation of a collaborative aesthetic response. The analysis served to inform the design of other interactive installations and exhibits and helped to reveal the highly variable and contingent forms of participation that can be provoked by particular artworks. This work continues the collaboration between the artist and social scientists at the Work Interaction and Technology Research Centre, King’s College London. Jason Cleverly provided the background and identified a number of the key themes that inform the structure of the paper. He drew out the relevance of the arguments for design, communication and aesthetics. The article examines the growing interest amongst artists and curators in designing art works which create new forms of visual communication and enhance interaction in museums and galleries. Despite extraordinary advances in the analysis of talk and discourse, there is relatively little research concerned with conduct and collaboration with and around aesthetic objects and artefacts. To some extent, the social and cognitive sciences have paid less attention to the ways in which conduct - both visual and vocal - is inextricably embedded within the immediate ecology, the material realities at hand. This article attends to this gap in the field. This article examines how people in and through interaction with others, explore, examine and experience a mixed-media installation. Primarily it is concerned with interaction with and around an art work