Embracing First Person Perspectives in Soma-based Design
• “[...] to consider the multiple facets when designing for the aesthetics of movement. The applications span a large field of designs, including slow introspective, contemplative interactions, arts, dance, health applications, games, work applications and many others.”
A multidisciplinary is more than ever necessary to tackle Soma-based approach in Design.
• “Some predict that the domain of body-, movement- and biosensor-based [63] interactions could be as big as or even bigger than desktop and mobile. They will be reaching beyond application areas in HCI where physical coordination and learning-by-doing are naturally important (such as movement rehabilitation, dance movement therapy, movement education including dance and sports training, self-cultivation, yoga, emotion regulation for management of stress and anxiety related health problems, and similar) into areas that do not yet see aesthetics of movement as a fundamental cornerstone in their design processes (such as communication within multi-stakeholder design processes, interaction with everyday IoT applications, quantified self and health apps, elderly home care).
Bio-sensor based environments seems to give a promising answer to a screenless society desire. My works is involved in this field.
• “As designers, we must be able to distinguish between all the fine nuances of different movements, tactile experiences or mirrorings of our bodily processes in interactive design.”
This is an ability I’m currently developing and am willing to pursue. For me it brings an important sensitivity.
• First Person Perspective: Theoretical Underpinnings: “A number of research projects on soma-based interaction have used Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body [58] as a theoretical backdrop.
“[...] German there are two terms for the body, Leib and Körper [...]”
“[...] there is also the interpersonal second person perspective of empathically experiencing the body of the other through our own bodies.”
“Different perspectives on the body, third person (I-It), second person (I-You) or first person (I-Me), inspire different approaches to design.”
Experiencing the body happens on different levels, I need to figure out how to spot and use these levels.
“In contrast, the first person approach [...] uses the designer’s lived body as a resource in the design process. Doing this requires a certain practiced sensitivity to the kinesthetic “feel” dimension of interaction design [45,79] [...]”
“The 1st person perspective does however create a blindness about the ways in which our lived bodies are different, and how these differences color our user experiences. One can imagine having a different body, e.g. being short or tall, skinny or obese, but one cannot experience being another body. The closest we get is through a second person perspective on the body, where the designer uses his or her body as an instrument for feeling the bodily aspects of the user experience of the other in co-design practices.”
• Aesthetics – building on the pragmatics movement: “Aesthetics is a way to examine connections between sensation, feeling, emotion and subjective understanding and values.”
It is an extremely complex and subjective field that requires confidence and highly flexible framework in the process.
• Somatics & Somaesthetics: Bringing in a Stronger Emphasis on the Soma:
[72] Richard Shusterman, Somaesthetics=> 2008, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics.
[29]: Thomas Hannah, 1995, What is Somatics? In Bone Breath & Gesture: Practices of embodiment.
“[...] to engage us all in actively, creatively changing and improving our experiences. By educating ourselves somatically [...]”
“Shusterman’s somaesthetics has been informed through a range of bodywork traditions and methodologies, from yoga and tai chi to more contemporary somatic movement education methods such as those developed by FM Alexander(Alexander Technique) [1] and Moshe Feldenkrais (Feldenkrais Method) [13] – both of which focus on the use of touch and movement as information for learning more effective coordination of body movement.”
“The concept of self-agency in somatics practice is key. Self-agency is the result of the reflective practice of self-observation coupled with intention. [...] A
limited repertoire of movement becomes a limited repertory of experiences.”
The analytical step towards the process is to never under-estimate.
• METHOD | Move to be Moved Workshop: “[...] Collaborative Walking exercise devised by one of the authors (drawn from the Bodyweather performance training methodology). All workshop participants stood in a line, shoulder to shoulder, very close to one another, with a red thread joining the whole line, from the first participant to the last, through their mouths. We were asked to close our eyes and then walk together, very slowly,without losing contact with our neighbors. After the exercise, we were asked to articulate our experience, sharing any insights or discoveries on walking. This transported us to the space of felt experiences – reminding us not only intellectually of why we were there, but somatically.”
“One of the key aspects that we explored was to notice how the exploratory exercises and interactions affected our physical state, and to bring that state into our dialogues and discussions. This deepened our sense of what it means to engage end-users in aesthetic, movement-based interactions – and made us more honest.”
It is essential to immerse the workshop collaborators into the soma mindset which is keeping them closer to their body awareness.
• RtD | Research through Design Analysis: “[...] a design cannot be understood solely by inspecting it as a static object. It comes to life as we start making it part of our practice.”
“[...] that bodily engagement seems to drive participants towards concrete ideas and away from the abstract, and to stimulate interaction based on personal experiences.”
That awareness state makes things more and more concrete.
• First- Person Methods & Material Encounters: “[...] Our movements are dynamically changing in response to kinetically dynamic possibilities in our environment. Those possibilities of course include any tools and artifacts
we create, cultural practices and so on. There is infinite variation in the world – both in our felt experience but also in the variations of the social and cultural landscape we are shaped by and actively take part in shaping, reinforced and
reinstated through all our everyday acts.
There is luckily a path out of the dilemma of the infinite space of possibilities design may shape the world, and that is to engage with your own body, your own movement, your own felt emotional experience and sense of aesthetics, and let the design process feed off of your own felt understanding and experience.”
• Change and Interest. “ “To reach precise bodily introspection the key is to direct our focused attention first to one part then another, a clearer sense of relations of parts to whole can be obtained. This transition of focus, provides
sense of change, it also renews our interest in each new body part”. [72]”
• Disrupting the Habitual. “Defamiliarizing habitual movement patterns is a core principle in many somatic practices [...]”
• Somatic Connoisseurship. “The practice of somatic connoisseurship highlights the significance of somatic facilitation as a role within the technological design processes. The role of somatic connoisseurship characterizes expertise that is developed, expressed, and passed on through the constantly refining process of soma-based aesthetic practice. [...] guiding collaborators in what to attend to, how to move and feel.”
“The experts in the workshop reported bringing on somatic connoisseurs such as choreographers, sourdough bakers, chefs, or Feldenkrais practitioners.”
• Laban-Movement-Analysis.
• Embodied Sketching. “[...] bodystorming, physical movement sketching, choreography of interaction, co-creation ideation activities.”
• Data and Program Code. “Applying a first person perspective to machine learning allows for shifting the focus from technical computations to designer intentions.”
These will be methods to use during the workshop I will be conducting.
• Conceptualizations Arising through Design Research: “[...] choice of language will not be an innocent choice here, but may shape what we are able to see and feel.”
“These strong concepts, experiential qualities and methods should not be seen as given, rigidly formed rules or patterns for interaction. They are conceptual lenses that help us ‘see’ potential design opportunities.”
DISCUSSION: FIRST PERSON PERSPECTIVE PROVIDING RIGOR IN SOMA-BASED DESIGN : “Through our engagement with one-another’s design exemplars, design practice and in our analysis, we note how successful soma-based designs all seem to share a structured,careful, thoughtful first person engagement. While the experts may employ different strategies to become more somatically and aesthetically aware, there is a shared understanding that you need to employ structured tactics to access your own movements, somatics and aesthetic sensibilities. We slow down our movements; disrupt the habitual to help us grasp and articulate what is there; we direct our attention to specific areas (change) and put our sustained attention to it (interest); we playfully engage in movement.
Even though a first person perspective in design puts an emphasis on the individual designers (or researchers) subjective aesthetic experiences, taking seriously your own sensations and experiences is also a prerequisite for communication and collaboration, for example within a design team. Given the “tacit” nature of bodily experiences, in that these kinds of sensations may be hard to articulate or verbalize, it becomes especially important to create common grounds for sharing such experiences. By engaging, as a group, in bodily and somatic experiences, these shared experiences can work as a common ground from which intersubjectively constructed meanings [70] or kinesthetic empathy [18] can be created. In this process, we bring the (digital and other) design materials early on, touching, feeling, interacting with them, thereby letting them ‘speak’ back to us[69], letting our design concepts thrive off their affordances.
Rigor also comes from testing and exhibiting our designs as well as letting others experience and create meaning with them. As mentioned above, it is hard to get well-articulated feedback from end-users, unless they are trained in someaesthetic bodywork practice on the specifics of some designs. But we can still observe the effects of use. Often, our designs are open to interpretation and the meaning and practice develops in dialogue with use, and we need to document and analyze those to provide depth in understanding.
