Designing for Movement Experience

Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction - TEI '07, 2007

This paper argues that movement-based interaction should be designed from a non-technological, people-centered point of view in order to create embodied and engaging interaction experiences. Further, it discusses social and contextual aspects that need to be taken into account when designing for movement-based interaction. The paper presents the design process and user explorations of a wearable movement-based interaction concept that was created in order to explore full-body movement as interaction modality. The starting point was taken in people's own experiences of communication and interaction through bodily movements, inspired by methods and theories used within modern dance. As design guidelines for the prototyped interaction concept we used aspects on movement that were directly derived from field studies of physical expression. The user explorations of the concept show preliminary examples of how people engage in movement-based interaction and how they are affected by the social interaction context.

2020

In this paper a framework for mapping human movement that matches the logic of describing corporal action with an organised integrated system of interaction is offered. To achieve this movement constructs that draw on broad terms of movement descriptions required by the language of Labanotation to create movement are used in combination with a noun-verb interaction model to communicate human actions that share a direct relationship to interactive system objects and operations. Underpinned by the development of an idea, as an organising principle, the framework supplies designers with a starting point to create interactions that align corporal motion with emerging uses of technology and product qualities. This allows for the interplay between different forms of interaction that unite movement with objects, actions and product qualities to be documented. The framework is described and illustrated by way of example and is extended to include mobile devices in its formation.

The Workshop Call for …, 2011

The body remains to some degree an elusive entity in our understandings of human cognition and our evolving relations with technology. With the advent of mobile and wearable sensor technologies, the body is brought to the fore as the essential and defining site of interaction and experience. Devices hosted by and around the body, or distributed in the environment, are able to read, measure, track and provide feedback on our location, proximity, gestures, movement patterns, pulse, breathing, emotional state, gaze and so on. What and how we carry or wear and how we move through space in our daily interactions have distinct influences on our experiences of the world around us and of course, our agency to act in our everyday lives.

Journal Européen des Systèmes Automatisés, 2014

The context of this paper is movement and gesture-based interaction for natural user interaction (NUI) design. Naturalness is not an intrinsic but a perceived quality; and although movement seems an ideal candidate for NUIs, it bears its own limitations. Although experience can be drawn from other interaction styles (e.g. desktop graphical interfaces, touch), we advocate that movement-based natural interaction should also be tackled from a fresh perspective. Many existing works are technology-driven; our approach focuses on users' definitions of interactions, leaving the technical issues for later works. In this paper, we present an experiment that identifies a set of user-defined gestures for a set of core tasks in freehand movement interaction using a large screen display. The experiment is divided into two steps, for exploration and validation. The exploratory step uses a bottomup approach. We use the context of a large screen television. Subjects were asked to spontaneously perform gestures to achieve a set of typical tasks (e.g. pointing, selecting, engaging/disengaging) in a wizard-of-Oz setup. We isolated the favored interactions for such tasks. The validation step uses a top-down approach. We used a motion capture device to produce skeleton videos of the gestures retained from step one. An online questionnaire allowed validating the first findings and assessing how the suggested interactions can be perceived. From those experiment we drew five natural, typical interactions corresponding to five tasks, that are heavily preferred by subjects and which form good candidates as controls in future interaction designs. RESUME. Dans cet article, nous abordons la conception d'interactions naturelles (NUIs) par l'interaction par le mouvement. L'aspect naturel d'une interaction n'est pas une qualité intrinsèque mais perçue par le sujet. Le mouvement semble un candidat idéal à l'interaction naturelle ; il présente cependant de nombreuses limitations. Bien que la conception de NUI basées mouvement puisse s'inspirer de domaines plus classiques de l'IHM (interfaces graphiques de bureau, interfaces tactiles), nous pensons que cette problématique doit également être abordée avec un regard vierge.

2015

The design community has growing familiarity with the concept of affordances and with the utility of this concept in any areas of design. Less emphasis has been placed on natural processes by which people acquire knowledge about affordances. Consequently, little is known about how design might be optimized to enable users to detect the actions that are available in a given human-machine system. We review scientific research about what people do to obtain information about affordances. We discuss implications of this research for design.

Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

This thesis aims at identifying and exploring properties and design aspects of human movement when used as interaction modality between people and technology. The work has been carried out with a multidisciplinary approach and combines theories, methods and practices from various areas such as modern dance, pedagogy, behavioural science, human computer interaction and research through design. The research question asked in this work is: Which communicative aspects and properties of human full-body movement are important when designing for movement-based interaction, and how could such design be accomplished? This question has been dealt with through carrying out an explorative study of people experiencing dance-based human movement. The informants used were participants on a dance course called Physical Expression. On the basis of this study the following aspects of human movement were identified and discussed: Movement imitation, Movement generation, Natural movements, The meaning of movement, Personal space, Self-confidence, and Movement literacy. These notions were further explored, in relation to movement-based interaction design, through the design and implementation of an interaction concept and a research prototype called BodyBug. BodyBug can be described as an artefact that initiates and maintains bodily movements through its need to be fed with movement input. It gives the users a possibility to create and explore three-dimensional movements within a personal interaction space, both individually and in groups. BodyBug is a small device but does not necessary create small-scale interaction and movements. The main findings from this research can be summarised in four theoretical notions that are related to human movement as a dynamic and communicative process: Movement Literacy, Personal Interaction Space, Imitate-React-Express and Social Acceptability. These notions reflect aspects of human movement such as the ability to verbalise, describe, sense and express intentions through human movement; the physical and emotional space we create when moving; the naturalness and understanding of movement; and finally, the social impact of movement. The design and implementation process of the interaction concept vi KinAesthetic Movement Interaction exemplifies how we can apply knowledge and physical experiences of human movement in concrete design for movement-based interaction. The design process of BodyBug is therefore described as a holistic design process. It also argues for the importance of, and need for, multidisciplinary competencies and contributions throughout the whole design process. This work has shown that making use of movement as interaction modality means to provide possibilities for getting to know one’s own movement pattern and thus utilising the kinaesthetic sense and kinaesthetic awareness. However, since movement-based interaction is still in its early phase, we need more experiences and physical examples of this kind of interaction in order to develop an increased knowledge of human movement as design material. We also need to further investigate how movement-based interaction is experienced, and to continue the search for the essence and physical grounding of human movement in relation to technology and computational artefacts. Some of the biggest challenges are to design for movement-based interaction without loosing the aspects of individual preferences and differences in movement, and to preserve the spontaneity and ambiguity in human movement. As shown in this thesis, one approach to deal with these issues is to design for the pleasure of motion.

Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference on - DIS '12, 2012

The topic of Materials has recently surfaced as a major theme within the research field of interaction design. In this paper we further discuss the need for in-depth descriptions of specific design cases, by revisiting some of our own research-through-design efforts when working with new or not yet fully explored materials for mobile interaction. We outline a series of design challenges that we see commonly arising in this domain, divided into three general themes; 1) affordances of hardware and casings, 2) experiential properties of different software solution, and 3) material properties of sensors, radio-signals, and electricity. Our main conclusion is that research in interaction design needs an extended focus on how systems are crafted from and together with properties of digital materials, and how new knowledge gained from those processes can be shared.

2013

The development of interactive technology is often based on the assumption of need to reduce the physical action and cognitive load of the user. However, recent conceptualizations, supported by research in various fields of science, emphasize human physical action in cognitive processes and knowledge formation. In fact, physical and closely related imaginary movement can be seen as the quintessence of humanity. Acknowledging this should imply a new approach to the design of interactive technology. In the current study, we propose a choreographic approach for shifting the focal point of interaction design to the aspects of human activity and movement within a technologized context. Hence, the proposed approach does not isolate use-related actions, which traditionally have been emphasized in interaction design, from the other activities of a person. The application of the methodological approach is divided into micro, local and macro levels, thus covering actions from minimal muscular activity of an individual to global movement-relevant issues.

Challenges, 2013

The development of interactive technology is often based on the assumption of need to reduce the physical action and cognitive load of the user. However, recent conceptualizations, supported by research in various fields of science, emphasize human physical action in cognitive processes and knowledge formation. In fact, physical and closely related imaginary movement can be seen as the quintessence of humanity. Acknowledging this should imply a new approach to the design of interactive technology. In the current study, we propose a choreographic approach for shifting the focal point of interaction design to the aspects of human activity and movement within a technologized context. Hence, the proposed approach does not isolate use-related actions, which traditionally have been emphasized in interaction design, from the other activities of a person. The application of the methodological approach is divided into micro, local and macro levels, thus covering actions from minimal muscular activity of an individual to global movement-relevant issues.