ProbeCreator: Auto-generating Theatre-Inspired Design Probes

Toxic behaviour is prevalent in livestreaming communities, particularly for minority groups such as LGBTQ+, POC, and women. To combat this, current solutions employ automatic or human content moderation. While necessary, moderation is a content-based intervention that is largely reactive, removing harmful content after it has already been posted. Drawing inspiration from physical theatre, I explore an alternative approach that seeks to create digital safe spaces by proactively fostering positive emotions for the livestreamer so that they engage in behaviours that encourage feelings of safety for others in their community. I leverage the field of theatre and the elements and principles of design to offer a Framework of Controllable Qualities, where ``Controllable Qualities'' refers to customizable audiovisual sensory cues used to create a particular mood or atmosphere in a space (such as the volume of a sound, the colour of a light, or the texture of a costume). I illustrate the application of my framework with four manually-created design probes (background images informed by the Framework of Controllable Qualities) that were deployed by participating livestreamers in a small, exploratory qualitative study. The design probes aimed to foster a spectrum of feelings of safety from extremely safe, moderately safe, moderately unsafe, to extremely unsafe. Through a qualitative study, I examine the values and practices that livestreamers and moderators held surrounding the creation of digital safe spaces, and if the presence of the design probes influenced feelings of safety for the livestreamer. Based on their feedback, I created a computational program built in Processing to auto-generate the design probes.
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The attached code is the computational program to auto-generate theatre-inspired design probes. This code is meant for use by livestreamers as background images to foster feelings of safety. This program is part of Mathilda Colins’ Computational Media Design MSc Thesis “Stream Starting Soon: Exploring Theatrical Design Principles to Evoke Feelings of Safety for Livestreamers”, which can be found at https://hdl.handle.net/1880/120479. Please credit the author if using the program and its generated images.