Co-Designing Unknown NIME Initiatives

NIME Leaders Workshop Facilitators

What’s missing from NIME?

Speculating on the gaps

What are the missing parts of our community? NIME is dominated by what we do, but it’s hard to imagine the impact what we don’t do (yet).

A challenge from the 2025 keynote

  • Clare Cooper’s NIME 2025 keynote challenged us to speculate on the possibilities and impacts of future NIMEs.

The three questions

  • What shall we gleefully abandon?
  • What shall we boldly launch?
  • What shall we lovingly maintain?

Part 1: Ideation (diverge)

Warm up (~1m): worst possible NIME. Shout out deliberately terrible ideas, then flip the best-worst into something real.

Generate (~7m): in groups, fill up sticky notes answering any of the three questions, one idea per note. Write silently first, then build on each other.

  • Stuck? Provocations: NIME with no conference / infinite budget / no screens / aeroplanes don’t exist / paper length limit 100 words.

Part 2: Critique & choose (converge)

Decide (~7m): plot your stickies on a 2x2 grid: impact (low to high) against effort (low to high).

  • Can it be made real? Low effort, feasible.
  • Should it be made real? High impact.
  • Pressure-test the leaders: who’s it for? what’s needed? what could go wrong?
  • High-impact + low-effort = do it!

Making it real

Commit (~5m): turn your chosen idea into a one-line pitch + a mandate + a first step.

  • Idea: one sentence anyone could repeat
  • Mandate: under whose banner? Self-started, a committee, or ask the board
  • First step: smallest thing doable in a month, and who owns it
  • It’s been done before: the Eco committee/wiki (Masu et al., 2021) and WiNIME (Xambó, 2018) started exactly this way

Boldly launch

Share: each group, one sentence: what will you launch, and your first step?

Thanks for joining us at the (first) future NIME leaders workshop! This was a new idea in January and now it’s real!

References

Hayes, L., & Marquez-Borbon, A. (2020a). Addressing NIME’s prevailing sociotechnical, political, and epistemological exigencies. Computer Music Journal, 44(2-3), 24–38. https://doi.org/10.1162/comj_a_00562
Hayes, L., & Marquez-Borbon, A. (2020b). Nuanced and interrelated mediations and exigencies (NIME): Addressing the prevailing political and epistemological crises. In R. Michon & F. Schroeder (Eds.), Proceedings of the international conference on new interfaces for musical expression (pp. 428–433). Birmingham City University. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4813459
Masu, R., Melbye, A. P., Sullivan, J., & Jensenius, A. R. (2021). NIME and the environment: Toward a more sustainable NIME practice. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. https://doi.org/10.21428/92fbeb44.5725ad8f
Morreale, F., Bin, S. M. A., McPherson, A., Stapleton, P., & Wanderley, M. (2020). A NIME of the times: Developing an outward-looking political agenda for this community. In R. Michon & F. Schroeder (Eds.), Proceedings of the international conference on new interfaces for musical expression (pp. 160–165). Birmingham City University. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4813294
Xambó, A. (2018). Who are the women authors in NIME?–improving gender balance in NIME research. In T. M. Luke Dahl Douglas Bowman (Ed.), Proceedings of the international conference on new interfaces for musical expression (pp. 174–177). Virginia Tech. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1302535