We present a soma design process of a digital musical instrument grounded in the designer's first-person perspective of practicing Dalcroze eurhythmics, a pedagogical approach to learning music through movement. Our goal is to design an instrument that invites musicians to experience music as movement. The designer engaged in the soma design process, by first sensitising her body through Dalcroze training. Subsequently, she articulated her bodily experiences into experiential design qualities that guided the making of the instrument. The process resulted in the design of a large suspended mobile played by touching it with bare skin. We shared our instrument with 7 professional musicians and observed how it inspires a variety of approaches to musical meaning-making, ranging from exploring sound, to choreographing the body. Finally, we discuss how engaging with Dalcroze eurhythmics can be generative to the design of music--movement interaction.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581488
As interaction designers are venturing to design for others based on autobiographical experiences, it becomes particularly relevant to critically distinguish the designer's voice from others' experiences. However, few reports go into detail about how self and others mutually shape the design process and how to incorporate external evaluation into these designs. We describe a one-year process involving the design and evaluation of a prototype combining haptics and storytelling, aiming to materialise and share somatic memories of earthquakes experienced by a designer and her partner. We contribute with three strategies for bringing others into our autobiographical processes, avoiding the dilution of first-person voices while critically addressing design flaws that might hinder the representation of our stories.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580977
There is an increasing interest in the HCI community in designing for bodily practices. We report on a soma design process for martial arts and the resulting artifact -- an interactive wooden dummy. Through a detailed account of the design process, we show how it enriched and revamped the bodily practice, but also how it changed the martial arts expert in the design team. Based on a phenomenological account of his experiences, we argue that the estrangement methods in soma design may allow practitioners engaging as soma designers, to cultivate and create new artistic habits fused with thought and feeling, changing themselves and their practice in directions they seek.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580722
We present a long-term collaboration between dancers and designers, centred around the transmission of the century-old repertoire of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. We engaged in a co-design process with a Duncanian dancer consisting of conversations and participation in her transmission of Duncan's choreographies and technique. We then articulated experiential qualities central to Duncan's repertoire and used them to guide the design of the probes, the sounding scarfs. Our probes sonify dancers' movements using temporal sensors embedded in the fabric of the scarfs, with the goal of evoking Duncan's work and legacy. We shared the probes with our Duncan dance community and found that they deepen the dancers' engagement with the repertoire. Finally, we discuss how co-designing with slowness and humility were key to the dialogue created between the practitioners, allowing for seamless integration of design research and dance practice.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581543
With the increasing adoption of body tracking technology, users are able to collect bio-data which designers struggle to make legible or actionable. This work focused on increasing this technology-mediated bodily understanding through exploring the material properties of the body rhythms that govern the sleep behaviours being tracked. Building from a workshop with non-normative sleepers, we reframe sleep tracking to be about understanding and manipulating body rhythms. We explore these rhythms through the RtD process of designing the Awari alertness-forecast and scheduling application in four iterations. This resulted in three non-exclusive categories of rhythmic influence: Slow & Cyclical, Pressure & Release, and Anchored. Through a better understanding of how they interact, their inertia, and their material properties for interaction we encourage the design of technology to shape, and be shaped, by the complex rhythms of life. We discuss ways in which this can democratise medical-models, and make actionable complex bodily processes.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581502
With most digital devices, vibrotactile feedback consists of rhythmic patterns of continuous vibration. In contrast, when interacting with physical objects, we experience many of their material properties through vibration which is not continuous, but dynamically coupled to our actions. We assume the first style of vibration to lead to hermeneutic mediation, while the second style leads to embodied mediation. What if both types of mediation could be used to design tactile symbols? To investigate this, five haptic experts designed tactile symbols using continuous and motion-coupled vibration. Experts were interviewed to understand their symbols and design approach. A thematic analysis revealed themes showing that lived experience and affective qualities shaped design choices, that participants optimized for passive or active symbols, and that participants considered context as part of the design. Our study suggests that adding embodied experiences as a design resource changes how participants think of tactile symbol design, thus broadening the scope of the symbol by design for context, and expanding their affective repertoire as changing the type of vibration influences perceived valence and arousal.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581356