Telephony

Our Telephony research programme is aimed at developing new interfaces for arts projects and for finding ways to build social networks between people. Telephony is central to our aim of designing more proactive forms of collaborative media that seek out potential participants.

By combining the widespread use of phones, mobiles and free internet calls with the flexibility of the internet, we can develop projects that do not rely on unfamiliar computer systems and only require phone connectivity. This will target our work towards the local Essex population which is very mobile and becoming more and more used to participating in cultural activities through cell phone media. Use of telephony will also help us to publicise projects by auto-dialling out to a potential audience and by allowing people to pass content amongst themselves through their phones. Our increasing skill in how to involve the public in telephony based arts projects and building social networks also allows us to develop consumer based services for mobile media.

Our research has underpinned several successful previous projects such as:

"TextFM" (2001)
"Phone-Slam" (2005)
"ARoundhead" (2005)
"Telephone Trotttoire" (2006)

Our telephony work concentrates on the following areas:

- how to create more flexible and powerful public interfaces for participatory arts projects to allow people to join in more easily. The successful “Phone-Slam: Southend Soundbites” competition developed for the “Being Here” initiative allowed us to work directly on the street with young people who would normally have no contact with the arts.

- using telephony networks as a way of designing projects with an international scope by allowing people to join in across national boundaries.

- take advantage of the habitual patterns of mobile phone usage amongst some hard-to-reach groups such as migrant communities and disaffected young people to build projects that engage them more productively.

- to build projects that can reach wider audiences by designing systems in which their means of dissemination is built into the activity itself.

"Telephone Trottoire", March 27th to May 8th, 2006
This was the most recent implementation of our telephony research - a project aimed at the Congolese community in partnership with the radio programme "Nostalgie Ya Mboka".

Read the report on the project here.