” Creative processes in collaborative mixed-reality environments: Stimulating invention and innovation through improvisation” – Joris Weijdom

Collaborative mixed-reality environments (CMRE) enable creative and learning processes through full-body interaction with spatially mediated ideas and concepts. Engineers utilize CMRE technologies to support their design processes but lack creative improvisation skills that artists employ to invent and innovate. This research studies the impact of artistic structured improvisation techniques (ASIT) in CMREs on engineering design education aiming to stimulate invention and innovation in an early stage of the process. The project combines theory and practice from the performing arts, human-computer interaction (HCI) and engineering to develop CMRE configurations, strategies for its creative implementation and an embodied immersive learning (EmIL) pedagogy.

Joris Weijdom is researcher and designer of mixed-reality experiences focusing on interdisciplinary creative processes and performativity. He founded the Media and Performance Laboratory (MAPLAB), enabling from 2012 until 2015 practice-led artistic research on the intersection of performance, media and technology. He works at the Professorship Performative Processes and teaches several BA and MA courses at the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, where he also obtained an European Media Master of Arts in Interactive Multimedia (EMMA-IMM) validated by the Portsmouth University in the UK in 1998. As a PhD candidate at the HKU, he currently researches creative processes in collaborative mixed reality environments (CMRE) in collaboration with the University of Utrecht and University of Twente.