MyWorld Audience Understanding Research

Overview

Media content has a very wide range of effects on audiences – some are immediate (for example making us cry or laugh or immersing us in a new world) and some are longer-term (for example changing our attitudes or behaviour).  There is a range of methods available to measure these effects on the audience: interviews, questionnaires, physiological monitoring, measuring behaviour etc.

MyWorld’s Audience Understanding research has mapped out these pre-existing methods, evaluated and validated them and is now adding new cutting-edge methods to this battery.  This will provide the creative industries with an easy-to-access toolkit to support audience understanding.  In turn, this will allow us together to evaluate the benefits of different versions or delivery modes in production; provide independent evaluation of the value and impact of the content to funders and stakeholders, and allow the creation of personalised experiences that are shaped to the individual or audience group, reflecting their needs and understanding.

Research Lead: Danaë Stanton Fraser

Danaë Stanton Fraser is a Professor in Human Computer Interaction and leads the CREATE Lab.

Danaë’s research focuses on the design and evaluation of mobile and ubiquitous technologies for interactivity and learning. Her research interests are in tangible and ubiquitous interfaces for education and transfer of spatial skills from virtual to real spaces in research areas such as technology-enhanced learning, human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing and spatial cognition. Danaë’s work is underpinned by a process of co-design with end users and industrial partners in the development and evaluation of technologies.

She is currently an investigator on the EPSRC Renew project, EPSRC Virtual Realities and an AHRC Creative Cluster and has published in high-impact international journals and conferences including ACM CHI, DIS, CSCL and Ubicomp as well as in JEP Applied, Behavioural Brain Research, Ergonomics, Computers in Human Behavior and Memory and Cognition.

Research Lead: Iain Gilchrist

Iain is a University Professor with over 25 years experience in UK higher education. His research is focused on how humans gather information about their visual environment.

“Vision provides information so that we can interact with the world but that information is often not immediately available. As a result we have to sample the world to find the goal relevant information. This sampling involves a range of motor systems including eye, arm, head, and whole body movements and is a decision making process. One major focus of our work has been to understand how and why we move our eyes to sample the world, another is the mechanisms that support human foraging.”