Data-driven creativity for screen production students: developing and testing learning materials involving audience biometrics

ABSTRACT

This article presents the Data-Driven Creativity Project (DDCP) materials designed to enhance screen students’ understandings of how aesthetic choices impact the audience. The project first collected data on audience attention (eye-tracking), arousal (skin conductance level) and emotion (using facial expression). This data was then used in pedagogical materials delivered to two student cohorts in both lecture format and as an e-learning package. Self-reported survey data on the student experience indicates significant increase in Learning Interest toward the concepts of the DDCP, as well as strong ratings of the material’s Useability and Application to Knowledge. We also report on focus group discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of the DDCP. We show that the DDCP offers an innovative and novel intervention into contemporary screen creativity pedagogy, forging a valuable teaching-research nexus between the findings of the research field of cognitive media theory and their application in the field of student production.

KEYWORDS:

• Screen production
• media education
• flipped learning
• data analysis
• audience studies
• biometrics

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the Curtin Office of Teaching & Learning for the grant funds awarded for the trial of this pilot study. We also thank the students for their participation, and to our teaching colleagues who generously made one week’s class time available for the pilot lecture-seminar session. We also thank the journal reviewers for thoughtful and insightful feedback on the initial draft of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Dr Stuart Bender is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. His research addresses the digital aesthetics of violence in media ranging from Virtual Reality, videogames, digital cinema and social media. As an interdisciplinary researcher, Bender combines media analysis with empirical methods of audience study to explore the cognitive and affective impact of violence on spectators. His most recent book, Legacies of the Degraded Image in Violent Digital Media, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017.

Dr Billy Sung is Senior Lecturer in the School of Marketing at Curtin University. His research to date has been based on the study of emotion and the application of psychophysiological methodology in multiple disciplines including psychology, marketing, health, nursing, and robotics. He also leads the Consumer Research Lab at Curtin University that uses biometric measures to conduct consumer research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Curtin University of Technology: [Grant Number Learning & Teaching Innovation Grant 2019, #35].