CXL

Welcome new PhD student Wanqi Wang!

Wanqi Wang is a PhD researcher at the Nottingham School of Art and Design. She holds a BA in Communication Studies and Art History from St. Lawrence University in 2020 and an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art in 2023. Working as an interdisciplinary artist and performance maker, Wanqi’s practice spans multiple media and is informed by cultural inquiry, inclusive design, and audience experience. Her work explores how meaning is produced beyond visual dominance, particularly within the abstract, conceptual, and multisensory nature of contemporary art. Alongside her artistic practice, she has professional experience as a museum tour guide in London, which shaped her interest in public engagement and accessibility within cultural institutions.

Her PhD research, Creating an AI Discussion Partner for Contemporary Art Galleries for Visitors with Sight Loss, investigates how conversational AI can facilitate inclusive, non-visual engagement with contemporary art. It focuses on supporting visitors with sight loss to navigate the abstract, conceptually rich, and multimodal nature of contemporary artworks. Rather than functioning as a simple descriptive tool, the AI acts as a conversational partner, fostering dialogue, reflection, and imaginative exploration. By integrating AI with human-centred design, the research aims to enhance accessibility, deepen understanding, and offer practical insights for galleries and inclusive cultural experiences.

Funded PhD project in Virtual Production and Mixed Reality interfaces

Do you want to join CXL? We are looking for an excellent candidate for a fully funded PhD project in Virtual Production (VP) and Mixed Reality (MR) interfaces (UK candidates only). This project will combine in situ user studies and technical prototyping to lay the groundwork for a new VP architecture, where physical and real assets are integrated seamlessly. We will take advantage of Nottingham Trent's professional-grade VP facilities (pictured) and work with partner studios across the UK. More information here:

Crossing Boundaries: Understanding the virtuality and physicality of Virtual Production

Talk: Understanding Untruth in Artificial Intelligence Through Synthetic Ethnography

Lars Erik Holmquist will give a talk at KTH The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and online on research about untruth in AI. Large Language Models (LLMs) have many practical uses in areas like journalism, search, coding and more. However, a growing concern is that they are also prone to presenting incorrect information. This is sometimes called “hallucinations”, but a more correct term would be “bullshit”, i.e. text produced without concern for its truth. In this study, we are not interested in what specific untruths LLMs presents, but how they do it. We used synthetic ethnography, a method for the qualitative study of generative models, to study two LLMs with different size and capability. We collected 3 cases where LLMs presented incorrect information and observed the strategies they used to justify this. From these observations we can start to form an understanding of what happens when an LLM reaches the edge of its knowledge-base and takes corrective action. Our conclusion is that the interfaces should be better designed to reveal this tendency of LLMs to “fill in” information they are missing, but that this ability may also be one of their strengths.

Time: Friday, October 31, 11.00-12.00 CET.

Information on how to join online or in person.

Talk by Lars Erik Holmquist on XR and Virtual Production

Time: Tuesday September 9, 13.15 CET

Lars Erik Holmquist will give an online talk in the series Positive Technology Visions organised by the Department of Applied IT at University of Gothenburg. The title is Liberated Pixels and Virtual Production: A Framework and a Test Case for XR Beyond Glasses, and it will be about how tangible interaction, extended reality and other advanced user interface concepts could be developed to support advanced film and media production.

Nottingham School of Art and Design has a state-of-the-art virtual production studio in our Design and Digital Arts building, which is used by students and staff for creating amazing environments and special effects. The picture to the right shows a recent filming of a Blade Runner-inspired dystopian short film which features a flying car!

Click here for full information and joining instructions!

Device Prototyping Summer School at Lancaster University

CXL PhD students Seher Singh and Anh Pham attended the 2025 Device Prototyping Summer School, held at Lancaster University from 15-18 June and sponsored by the pro² network+.

The event itself was a great mix of presentations, demos, tutorials, panels, and hands-on activities, such as soldering components on a printed circuit board and getting to grips with CAD software. The students were able to connect with other brilliant minds across this space, including established researchers such as Steve Hodges and Lorraine Underwood, as well as students from universities across the world. The summer school was very useful in helping the students understand how devices are made and how to scale up their production, and both of them really enjoyed and appreciated this opportunity.

Seher Singh was also awarded with a prize worth £200 for her prototype idea Tomadoro: a gamified pomodoro device.

You can find more information about the summer school as well as the student papers here: https://prosquared.org/2025-summer-school/

Masterclass with Elizabeth Churchill, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

We have the privilege of hosting a session with Professor Elizabeth Churchill, one of the top scientists in the world in human-centred digital technology, with experience from some of the largest companies in the world. She is currently Department Chair of Human Computer Interaction at MBZUAI, the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Time: Wednesday July 23, 14.00-16.00

Place: Waverley 129 (City Campus) – please ask at reception for access

Details:

Dr Elizabeth F. Churchill is Professor and founding Department Chair of Human Computer Interaction at MBZUAI (the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence) in Abu Dhabi, UAE. She was formerly a Senior Director of User Experience at Google. She is an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow, a member of the ACM’s CHI Academy, and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. She has built research teams at Google, eBay, Yahoo, PARC and FujiXerox.

Professor Churchill is an applied social scientist, interactive technology designer and social communications researcher. She has a background in psychology (neuro, experimental, cognitive and social), AI, and cognitive science. For the past 20+ years, she has drawn on social, computer, engineering and data sciences to create innovative end-user applications and services. For the past few years, she has been most active in the areas of ubiquitous and mobile computing, social media, computer mediated communication, locative media and internet/web sciences. During this time, Professor Churchill designed and evaluated enterprise and consumer-facing information/communication applications and services for desktop, mobile, tablet and large screen devices.

https://elizabethchurchill.com

https://mbzuai.ac.ae/study/faculty/elizabeth-churchill/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethfchurchill/

At this Masterclass, we will have a discussion, led by Professor Lars Erik Holmquist, about Dr. Churchill’s experience as a researcher crossing industry and academia, and working at the frontline of many of the world’s top tech companies. The session will be very interactive, and we invite everyone, in particular PhD students and early career researchers, to take part!

Hope to see you there!

Design Studios and Cosy Games at ARPPID 2025

CXL have two presentations at ARPPID 2025, a new Working Conference on Academic Research and Professional Practice in Interaction Design taking place in London on July10-11.

Lars Erik Holmquist and Sam Nemeth will present the Case Study The Design Studio of the Future: Insights from A Practical Experiment in Remote Collaboration. In this project, which was partly carried out during the Covid pandemic, we aimed to recreate the positive features of a design studio in an educational and workplace setting using distance-spanning digital technology. Inspired by Conjoint Control, we constructed realistic solutions using off-the-shelf hardware and software that afforded novel and efficient ways of blending co-located and distance collaboration. From this we learned that although much of the required hardware already exists, it is not generally being used to its full potential, and that the standard meeting software is often not fit for this kind of creative collaboration settings.

Also at ARPPID, Anh Pham and Lars Erik Holmquist will present a poster titled From Cosy Games to Metaverse: Deriving Positive Interaction Qualities through Netnography. To gain design guidelines for a more welcoming Metaverse experience, we examined cosy games, which offer a non-violent and relaxing experience. Through netnography and thematic analysis we identified two main aspects of the positive user experience: positive emotional experiences and anticipation experiences. The findings will serve as the foundation for exploring the future potential and create design frameworks for creating more inclusive Metaverse applications.