Full-body movement as material for interaction design

Abstract

This article focuses on the design potential of digital interactions where the body is seen as the interface. With computational technology and sensors infiltrating many aspects of our lives and urban surroundings, interaction designers' ability to visualise and generate designs are important in order to understand and explore such design spaces. I propose three concepts—accessibility, immediacy and generation—as means for analysing movement as a design material for interaction design. Drawing on a social semiotics approach, contemporary choreographic research is studied where digital tools are used to generate, explicate and communicate interactive movement. I argue that by drawing on the particularities and potentials of the moving body as interface such as those explored through choreographic practice, we may avoid imitating existing exchanges with technology and create novel interactions.

Keywords:

• interaction design
• design material
• communication
• choreography

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Professor Andrew Morrison for constructive feedback and encouragement.

Notes

The notion of patterns in design comes from Christopher Alexander's work in urban planning in the 1970s, where architectural patterns represent ways for supporting patterns of events that frequently occur in a space (Alexander 1979); it has been used in interaction design as a way to communicate best-practice to recurring problems (Löwgren and Stolterman 2004, Löwgren 2007).

Norah Zuniga Shaw is a choreographer and Director of Dance and Theory at ACCAD, and Co-Creative Director of Synchronous Objects.

The notion of immediacy here refers to a duration of time in an iterative design process, rather than a distinguishing notion of transparency between the virtual and real (Kickasola 2006). It is closer to Schneiderman's (1998) use of direct manipulation where an action has an immediate visual effect (such as when driving a car and turning the wheel).

Such as the aforementioned eyesweb and gesture follower as well as Merce Cunningham's Lifeforms, Troika Ranch's Isadora and Meso's vvvv.