Stream Starting Soon: Exploring Theatrical Design Principles to Evoke Feelings of Safety for Livestreamers
Date
2025-01-14
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Abstract
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) 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, 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. Drawing on their feedback, I created a computational program built in Processing to automatically generate design probes. I make four contributions: 1) a richer understanding of how to translate physical theatrical design elements to a digital livestream context through the creation of a Framework of Controllable Qualities, 2) the application of a subset of the Framework of Controllable Qualities to inform the design of manual and automatically generated design probes to foster feelings of safety, 3) a deeper understanding of livestreamer and moderator practices to foster safety and inclusivity within a livestream community, and 4) an understanding of livestreamer and moderator experiences with the manually-created design probes and its influence (if any) on feelings of safety for the livestreamer.
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Keywords
Livestreaming, Theatre Design, Safe Spaces, Minority Communities, Inclusion, Procedural Content Generation (PCG), Generative Art
Citation
Colins, M. (2025). Stream starting soon: exploring theatrical design principles to evoke feelings of safety for livestreamers (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.