Participatory Design: Principles and Practices
Participatory Design: Principles and Practices
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Practitioner-led artistic research, combined with interactive technologies, opens up new and unexplored design spaces. Here we focus on the creation of a tool for opera-singers to dynamically disform, change and accompany their voices. In an opera composed by one of the authors, the title-role singer needed to be able to alter his voice to express hawking, coughing, snuffling and other disturbing vocal qualities associated with the lead role Joseph Merrick, aka "The Elephant Man". In our designerly exploration, we were guided by artistic experiences from the opera tradition and affordances of the technology at hand. The resulting instrument, The Throat III, is a singer-operated artefact that embodies and extends particular notions of operatic singing techniques while at the same time creating accompaniment. It therefore becomes an emancipatory tool, putting a spotlight on some of the power hierarchies between singers, composers, conductors, and stage directors in the operatic world.