On Values, Technological Mediation, and the Artifacts they Create

Brittney Allen, and Andrew McPherson

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

This paper investigates values within the material and sonic cultures of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) research with a focus on the techno-cultural practices prevalent at the NIME conference and in related human-computer interaction (HCI) research. The NIME community, despite its cultural diversity, relies disproportionately on particular technologies, aesthetic priorities, and forms of musical practice, and these affect both the tangible artifacts of NIME research and the stories that are told about them by the authors. We conduct a situational analysis of 26 tangible digital musical instruments (DMIs) from the 2024 NIME conference proceedings alongside 20 artifact-related papers from the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference. Our analysis reveals five emergent values-oriented themes: Unconventionality, Community, Care, Intimacy, and Transformation. We probe areas of convergence and divergence within each theme and speculate on actionable steps toward the generation of differentiable, community-enabled and values-accurate design artifacts.

Citation

Brittney Allen, and Andrew McPherson. 2026. On Values, Technological Mediation, and the Artifacts they Create. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20784149 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_44,
 abstract = {This paper investigates values within the material and sonic cultures of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) research with a focus on the techno-cultural practices prevalent at the NIME conference and in related human-computer interaction (HCI) research. The NIME community, despite its cultural diversity, relies disproportionately on particular technologies, aesthetic priorities, and forms of musical practice, and these affect both the tangible artifacts of NIME research and the stories that are told about them by the authors. We conduct a situational analysis of 26 tangible digital musical instruments (DMIs) from the 2024 NIME conference proceedings alongside 20 artifact-related papers from the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference. Our analysis reveals five emergent values-oriented themes: Unconventionality, Community, Care, Intimacy, and Transformation. We probe areas of convergence and divergence within each theme and speculate on actionable steps toward the generation of differentiable, community-enabled and values-accurate design artifacts.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {44},
 author = {Brittney Allen and Andrew McPherson},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20784149},
 editor = {Benedict Gaster and João Tragtenberg and Anna Xambó and Tom Mitchell},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {},
 numpages = {11},
 pages = {377--387},
 title = {On Values, Technological Mediation, and the Artifacts they Create},
 track = {Paper},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_44.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}