Category: Master’s theses

In this blog post, Jan de Wit writes about an article he recently published together with NMD graduates Alicia van der Kraan and Joep Theeuwes. In this article, they present the findings of the research that Alicia and Joep conducted for their master’s theses. It was published in a special issue on digital games and mental health, as part of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. You can find the full article here.

There is a rise in the popularity of live streaming platforms, on which streamers broadcast content, mostly related to videogames, to an audience of viewers that tune in from all over the world. While watching the streamer play games, the viewers are able to interact with each other, and sometimes also with the streamer, by using the chat function that is part of the platform. These interactive features enable the streamers to build a tight-knit community around them.

Twitch from the viewer’s perspective. On the left is a list of popular channel suggestions (blurred for privacy), in the middle the broadcasted game and streamer, on the right the chat.

The majority of people active on Twitch, currently the most popular live streaming platform, are male (81.5%), and 55% of users are between 18 and 34 years old. This can be a difficult time in a person’s life, where the transition from adolescence into adulthood takes place. Not being able to successfully complete these transitional steps, including figuring out your identity, career, and relationships with others, could lead to experiencing various mental health issues such as anxiety or depression. There are several invasive life events that could happen at any age, such as break-ups, financial stress, or death of a loved one, that can lead to mental health issues as well. This particular demographic to which the majority of Twitch users belong is however relatively unlikely to seek out professional help when needed.

We therefore wondered if platforms such as Twitch could provide comfort for people going through these difficult and stressful times. We were also curious to learn whether people’s viewing behaviour changed during these difficult times, for example by actively seeking out smaller communities to have more meaningful interaction. To investigate whether this is indeed the case, we conducted a survey with 84 participants, all current Twitch viewers that were going through a difficult period in life when filling in the survey, or had experienced such a difficult period in the past.

The majority of participants indicated that Twitch helped them cope, and that it became a larger part of their lives during the difficult period compared to regular viewing. Recurring themes were the entertainment, distraction, and sense of community Twitch offers. Viewing behaviour during difficult periods appears to remain largely the same in terms of the streamers that are watched, although time spent viewing increases, and there is a change toward more time spent actively watching rather than having the stream on in the background. Several participants shared anecdotes of times when they benefitted from participating in a streamer’s community, and were sometimes even helped by the streamer directly (e.g., through self-disclosure from the streamer discussing their problems).

In summary, our research shows that streamers, supported by platforms such as Twitch, serve an important purpose for people that are active on the platform and are going through a difficult time, even without consciously attempting to do so. It is important to note, however, that the interactions that happen on Twitch are not a replacement for any kind of professional support. At the same time, we do believe that the streamers and viewers active on Twitch are able to contribute to mental health awareness and literacy, and hope that they are able to remove some of the obstacles that prevent people from seeking out additional help when needed.

One of our recent NMD graduates, Oana Bogdescu, published an interesting article about her master’s thesis on the social journalism platform Medium.com. Oana’s thesis is about cognitive bias, or systematic errors in human thinking processes due to irrational judgement. In our irrational world, for instance, we find it easy to point out someone else’s fallibility but we often fail to see our own. Although everyone is prone to cognitive bias, we always seems to believe we ourselves are less susceptible than others.

Oana researched the role such cognitive biases play in UX practitioners’ work. What are the implications of the naive self-image regarding cognitive bias, and how can this be reduced? Read all about her findings in her article on Medium.com!

From having never done any academic research to passing my master’s thesis with flying colors and presenting my thesis study at an actual academic conference in Amsterdam. My time at Tilburg University the past 2 years has been quite the rollercoaster for me! In this blog entry, I am going to tell you more about my thesis topic of interactive narratives and how I got to present it at Etmaal 2020.

Let me introduce myself, my name is Iris Boogaard and I am a 25-year-old freelance videographer and editor. However, I am also a recent master’s degree graduate in New Media Design. This February, I had the opportunity to present my thesis at the “Etmaal van de Communicatiewetenschap”, the annual conference for all communication science scholars in the Netherlands and Flanders.

My thesis focused on interactive narratives, an expressive form of new media in which audience members are allowed to influence important aspects of the story. For instance, they can allow users to engage in multiple perspectives in a narrative. In contrast to traditional narratives, interactive digital narratives (IDN) present information in a non-linear way, as shown in the figure below.

IDN have emerged as promising means for providing new ways to engage us, in fields such as journalism, education and entertainment. However, when looking into previous studies, I soon realized that little empirical research had been carried out investigating whether interactive narratives have the ability to represent complex information. Is information presented in an interactive narrative easier to comprehend than information presented in a traditional linear narratives?

I explored this question by looking into the award-winning documentary Last Hijack Interactive. This online experience focuses on the Somali piracy crisis, in particular the hijacking of a cargo ship in the Arabian Sea that occurred in 2008. Interestingly, both the actual captain and the hijacker are interviewed to share their perspectives. For each chapter in the story, users of the online interface can decide which side of the story they want to hear.

By creating different versions of this documentary, I was able to study whether having agency and being able to witness multiple perspectives of a narrative can influence one’s understanding of a complex situation such as the Somali piracy crisis. After reviewing over 90 responses in my experiment, I found that participants who experienced multiple perspectives, scored significantly higher on their understanding of the situation. By looking into my qualitative results, I discovered that from a single perspective viewpoint, the hijacker was perceived as a flat character lacking character growth. Since participants weren’t able to create an extensive character model about the hijacker, their understanding scores were lower than participants who experienced the captain’s side or both sides to the story.

What do we learn from this? In order to demonstrate the complexity of a situation, both researchers as well as creators need to keep in mind that rich characters are required from multiple sides of the situation. Moreover, we might need to script interactors by providing both control as well as guidelines on how to interact with a non-linear narratives.

Curious to know how I studied this? I created a short explainer video with a short summary of our research, including explanation of how each variable was manipulated and the results of the study.

With the help of my teachers, we created a short paper about this research, which was accepted to both ICIDS 2019 as well as Etmaal 2020. Earlier this year, I was allowed to present my study at Etmaal. An exciting experience for me, very lovely to be complimented on my work by so many professionals!

Thanks to the help of my teachers for all their support and advice: Renske van Enschot from Tilburg University, and Hartmut Koenitz and Christian Roth from the University of the Arts Utrecht.

Click here to read the conference paper ‘The Potential of Interactive Digital Narratives. Agency and Multiple Perspectives in Last Hijack Interactive’.

Iris Boogaard

Did you just read the first two sentences? Was it hard? I manipulated them by using different fonts and font sizes, which can affect the way our brain deals with this cognitive task. Cognitive scientists refer to fluency and disfluency in this respect, to indicate how easy (fluent) or difficult (disfluent) it is to process a cognitive task. My name is Nancy Coster, and for my NMD master’s thesis, I studied the effect of Virtual Reality (VR) on fluency and poetry appreciation.

Fluency theory and previous research suggests that we like easy-to-process stimuli better than stimuli that are difficult to process. Such stimuli can be all sorts of things such as faces, texts, or images. Thus, fluency comes in all shapes and sizes. In my master’s thesis, I focused on both perceptual fluency (e.g. visual/structural aspects of stimuli) and conceptual fluency (e.g. the meaning of stimuli).

Although appreciation of poetry has been studied before, VR is a relatively new medium in this type of research. It is an interesting research medium in poetry research as poets are exploring new ways to showcase their work. Today, poetry is not only consumed by reading a poem printed in a book, but you can attend poetry slams, listen to poets, or hear a poem and simultaneously experience visual effects in a multimedia environment. VR offers interesting new ways to experience poetry. For instance, VR could make difficult poems easier either to understand by enhancing the perceptual characteristics or visualizing what the poem is about.

In my experiment, participants experienced poems in either a VR environment or an audio environment. In the VR environment, poems were manipulated in two ways. In the perceptual manipulation, the participants would see a color that would emphasize the structure or rhyme within the poem. In the conceptual manipulation, participants would see the poem depicted. Afterwards they would rate their general appreciation of the poem, as well as its flow, structure, topic clarity, and difficulty.

Thanks in part to several newspapers picking up on my research, I was able to conduct my experiment with 800 participants. The results showed that participants generally appreciated easy stimuli better than difficult stimuli. Interestingly, the results showed that participants preferred audio poems over VR poems. Several participants mentioned that this experiment was their first VR experience however, which could have affected these results. I also found an interaction effect for topic clarity in the conceptual poem manipulation; ratings for the easy poem were higher in the audio condition, whereas ratings for the difficult poem were higher in the VR condition. So VR seems to support experiencing a difficult conceptual poem and resulted in a higher rating on topic clarity.

The interaction effect I found for topic clarity in a difficult poem experienced in VR is very promising for future poetry applications. Just imagine: making difficult poetry easier for students when experiencing it in VR could perhaps help in a learning environment. Also, it could positively affect understanding and appreciation of poetry. And if Virtual Reality can be applied to the field of poetry, perhaps it could help in making other types of difficult content easier to understand as well.

Nancy Coster

Occupational therapists (ergotherapeuten in Dutch) are health professionals who help people with physical or mental health problems to participate in the things they want and need to do in everyday life. For instance, they help their clients to find suitable assistive devices to perform activities of daily living, like customized cooking utensils, pen/pencil grips, or hand/grab rails to get out of bed.

In the past, occupational therapists were trained to make such assistive devices themselves. Nowadays, however, most assistive devices are selected from manufacturers’ catalogs. Unfortunately, such off-the-shelf assistive devices are very generic, and options to customize these devices to an individual client are limited. This is where 3D printing comes in. What if occupational therapists would have a 3D printer at their disposal? This may allow them to make their own assistive devices again, and to realise tailor-made solutions for their clients.

This was the starting point for the master’s thesis research of NMD student Tereza Loučová. Her aim was to study occupational therapists’ willingness to adopt 3D printing technology. More specifically, she studied how hands-on experience with an important aspect of 3D printing, 3D modelling, affects occupational therapists’ attitudes.

In her thesis project, Tereza was very lucky to get in touch with a Kaatsheuvel-based company CADdesign CAD trainingen. The CEO of this company, Harold Weistra, is an avid proponent of the pay-it-forward principle. As he was helped by many people in establishing his own company, he was actively looking for societally relevant projects that he could help. He offered to help Tereza by organizing a full-day workshop in 3D modelling to a group of occupational therapists free of charge! This allowed Tereza to assess and compare the therapists’ attitudes towards 3D printing both before and after the workshop. The occupational therapists, in turn, were able to experience hands-on what it is like to design their own 3D printable assistive devices.

Tereza’s research showed that after participating in the workshop occupational therapists had more positive perceptions of the usefulness of 3D printing, especially due to the possibilities this technology offers for customizing assistive devices. However, hands-on experience with creating 3D models also made occupational therapists aware of the fact that learning to use 3D printing technology requires even more time and effort on their behalf than they initially expected. As such, they developed a preference to set up collaborations with 3D printing experts rather than to engage in 3D printing on their own.

We are very grateful for Harold’s offer and think this is a wonderful example of a valuable collaboration between design research and design practice!