Embodied interaction: body, movement and experience
Intelligence in the Body
The body we inhabit is a remarkable mechanism, which functions in complex ways. We are not fully aware of its functioning in our everyday life. When we open our fridge, we are not consciously telling our hand to grab the handle and to pull the fridge door open. When we ride a bike, we are not giving conscious commands to our body in regards of how to control the bike. All of this movement knowledge is ingrained into our brain synapses and the nerves in our body. The experts say [1], that these intuitively accessible memories are stored in nerve connections and firing axons, from where they can be accessed when needed. This allows us to be able to retrieve skills intuitively at needed times: such as the ability to ride the bike or dance when we wish to, without being aware of how we actually do it. This is the intelligence in the body.
It is difficult to forget something we have once learnt through our bodily experience. We can not easily forget how to swim, even if we would like to and would try to. We can not generally forget how to walk or talk, unless a serious type of brain damage would affect us. The skill strength is determined by how often we access and activate the bodily memory associated with them. How does this relate to us as embodied, learning and experiencing entities?
As described above, the learning and intelligence that takes place in our body is so deeply rooted, that it constitutes ourselves as individuals. Therefore, we are the constituents of our bodily experience in this world. To emphasize the point, the abilities and skills that we have are not only stored in our cognitive functions, but they are stored in our whole body. This is why if someone tells us how to ride a bike in theory, we may still not be able to do it in practice — we only have a conceptual model of how to do it. The practice is stored across our body in muscles and the brain. And by practicing certain actions and movements, we are able to build stronger nerve connections, that allow us to access these memories or behaviors more fluently over time. This is how we become professionals at drawing or dancing — through practice.
According to [2], our brain fires a signal, when we see another person engaging in a specific type of movement and the strength of the brain activity can be connected to how well the individual is familiar to the movement. This indicates, that our learning of movement is also coded into our bodies on a very fundamental level and that it is also a social practice. The movements of other people influence on the development of our own bodily actions, and visual sense plays a large role in learning movement.
Contemporary Dance and Learning Movement
I started contemporary dance at the age of 8, and continued it until I was 15. I also used to also dance show dance and ballet for a few years each, so I gathered some experience on how to work with the body. The experience of contemporary dance, from my perspective, was based on learning to move through first, second and third person perspectives, that [2] also mentions in the context of designing for interactions with technology. In contemporary dance practice, the learning is achieved through:
1) the teacher giving commands of specific terms in french, such as make a series in which you perform plié, relevé and jump (third-person description of the movement)
2) after the instruction, the teacher performs the series and one can look at it from second person perspective. At this point one starts to feel sensations in their body, in the muscles that are anticipated to be used in each action. It is like a mental pre-play of the choreographic sequence (second-person perspective of the movement)
And 3), the dancer actually goes through the sequence with their own body. This is then worked on and fine tuned, so that the body learns the movement in its detail. The dancer can look at their body through full-width mirrors in the dance hall to see how their body looks from another perspective from all directions. The dancer also repeats the sequence and tries to feel how the correct movement feels like in order to learn it. The teacher may also give advice on how to position the body and what to focus on. (first-person perspective of the movement accompanied with the other perspectives).
Overall, the practice of dancing is extremely challenging — the dancer needs to learn the movements in very high detail and juggle between different perspectives. It includes training for the movement, but often also developing a body schema [3], the unconscious knowledge we have of our lived bodies and their movement potential. And we may often have difficulties verbally articulating the embodied knowledge that is contained on the bodily schema, as described by [2, 4].
This is a particular challenge, when designing and researching for embodied interaction design, as the participants of our user studies may encounter difficulties in understanding, remembering, and verbalizing what they did with the technology and remember afterwards only the feeling that they had during the experience.
I wish, I had known about Laban’s movement theory [2] at the time I was dancing, because it would have offered a third-person perspective of the choreography and helped to describe the movements verbally. Expectedly, this would also have deepened my understanding of dance, as switching and exploring between different perspectives seems to do. But later on I was introduced to this theory in the context of human-computer interaction, and revealed its usefulness when designing embodied experienced with various kinds of technologies. When designing for interactions or experiences, there is a certain value in understanding and analysing the psychological factors and the actual bodily sequences of the interaction, as well as their interplay together. And shifting between these various perspectives is something that the designer should be capable of doing.
Embodying the Design Practice
Finally, I also argue that ultimately design practice is like dancing, one kind of an embodied experience. What I mean by that, is that the designerly experiences get ingrained and integrated into our bodies and this is how we become designers, learning through the above-mentioned three different perspectives. I think what makes a good designer is their capability to embody the role of a designer, instead of only approaching design practices using objective theories and pre-defined methodologies. Designers are trained in how to solve complex problems, and we need continuous bodily practice in solving complex problems by going through the process of it. To actually embody and internalize the process of problem-solving — with the help of tools, materials, theories and practices acquired over time, and with the mindset of developing the ability to critically assess and develop new tools when it is needed in the process.
References
1. Kalat, J.W.: Biological Psychology. (2013).
2. Loke, L., Larssen, A.T., Robertson, T., Edwards, J.: Understanding movement for interaction design: frameworks and approaches. Pers. Ubiquitous Comput. 11, 691–701 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-006-0132-1.
3. Svanæs, D.: Interaction design for and with the lived body : Some implications of merleau-ponty’s phenomenology. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 20, 1–30 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1145/2442106.2442114.
4. Fdili Alaoui, S., Schiphorst, T., Cuykendall, S., Carlson, K., Studd, K., Bradley, K.: Strategies for Embodied Design: The Value and Challenges of Observing Movement. In: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition — C&C ’15. pp. 121–130. ACM Press, Glasgow, United Kingdom (2015). https://doi.org/10.1145/2757226.2757238.
5. Höök, K., Jonsson, M.P., Ståhl, A., Mercurio, J.: Somaesthetic Appreciation Design. In: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — CHI ’16. pp. 3131–3142. ACM Press, Santa Clara, California, USA (2016). https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858583 .
Images
1. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-an-action-potential-2794811
2. https://scontent.farn1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/24831220_1547420962010758_3280984866105624090_o.jpg?_nc_cat=100&_nc_ht=scontent.farn1–1.fna&oh=a048f28f41d382ed96bbdaa76f9c7aa0&oe=5D2CCDE0
3. https://linesballet.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Featured-Image-836MGallery.jpg
