Quantifying audience experience in the wild: Heuristics for developing and deploying a biosensor infrastructure in theaters

Measuring the experience of audience of arts events is essential in the “experience economy” of this day and age, but it is a difficult task. The value of such information goes beyond evaluating the impact of the arts, as it can provide insights and feedback to enhance the work of artists and the experiences of other audience members. Through in-depth understanding of the needs of the providers and consumers of the arts, we progressively developed a biosensor infrastructure that was deployed in theaters. Over the years, we identified the challenges and issues related to developing and deploying a biosensor infrastructure in theaters. These collective experiences and identified issues were categorized into three main areas: processes, data, and system. A total of seven heuristics are developed across the three main areas. Processes place the stakeholders and audiences at the core of the research; data provides guidelines for data validity, collecting a variety of data, and supporting real-time data gathering; and systems covers the concurrency, scalability, deployment and feedback of the infrastructure. We believe that this set of heuristics forms the foundation for an adequate infrastructure to measure audience experience in the wild and it is a valuable source of guideline for future work.