Artistic co-creation empowers communities to shape their narratives, however HCI research does not support this multifaceted discussion and reflection process. In the context of community opera, we consider how to support co-creation through the design, implementation, and initial evaluation of the Co-Creation Space (CCS) to help community artists 1) generate raw artistic ideas, and 2) discuss and reflect on the shared meaning of those ideas. This work describes our user-centered process to gather requirements and design the tool, and validates its’ usability with 6 community opera participants. Our findings support the value of our tool for group discussion and personal reflection during the creative process.

Motivated to create a children’s VR game for the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV), this research asks how might we design an immersive game for children to meaningfully interact with media and metadata in cultural heritage contexts? First, during a ‘design salon,’ 13 data and heritage experts challenged children’s ability to interact with metadata. In response, we ran workshops with 19 children focused on understanding abstract media and data. We found that while (1) metadata has many challenges, (2) children understand abstract data when it is grounded in concrete experiences, are (3) motivated to interact with archival media through in immersive and collaborative contexts, and (4) are interested in exploring media diversity through categorisation games with high-level narrative goals. These findings inform our game concept and three core insights for designing immersive experiences for cultural heritage: Considering the Contextual Complexity of Data and Audience Needs, Connecting Data Abstractions to Embodied Narratives Through Categorisation Mechanics, and Supporting Abstract Meaning Making Using the Immersive Affordances of VR.

This paper presents the research, experimentation and evaluation work of two open pilots performed with the Co-Creation Stage tool. This tool enables live experiences in the field of performing arts, connecting distributed locations in real-time and enabling co-located and participatory experiences. One of the open pilots is in the area of opera, performing a co-created work-in-progress between professionals led by SAMP, a Portuguese artistic organisation, and inmates, workers and relatives of a youth prison (EPL-J) in Leiria (Portugal). The main stage of the opera was at the Gulbenkian concert hall in Lisbon, with professional singers and musicians together with inmates and relatives. There was a live link to a secondary stage in the prison with inmates and professional musicians, as well as links to ex-inmates and relatives from all over the world. The second pilot was an interactive and participatory theatre play performed by Utopian, a Theatre Company in Getxo (Spain), where remote viewers could be part of the experience by interacting with the actors and influencing the narrative. In this paper we present the lessons learnt in the evaluation of these pilots through questionnaires and interviews with participants, audience and experts.