FAQ for Body As Starting Point Workshop Y2 CHI2019
Interested in Your Body? and how knowing about it can help you and the world be Fantastic? Join us at CHI2019 for the Body As Starting Point Workshop. Here’s some FAQ-ness.
Questions:
where is the link to the workshop? https://bodyasstartingpoint.tumblr.com/post/181648060821/y2
can i join as a participant? Yes - you need AccessW32 as the code to register as a participant on the CHI registration website . Early reg ends March 11
Where are the papers listed that will be discussed? Coming monday after Feb 28 [UPDATE MARCH 4: authors are currently revising their papers. We’ll post as soon as they come in by month end]
BIG QUESTION: what is inbodied interaction? Inbodied interaction is a focus on how to design interactive systems to support building better awareness/sensing/feeling of our magnificent internal processes - it’s to help people FEEL better and so feel BETTER.
Inbodied interaction postulates a health and wellbeing dichotomy from
PREVENTION on one end and PERFORMANCE on the other. The state of the body immediately affects performance: from social to cognitive; not just physical. We know this. Our focus is around performance rather than prevention: how can supporting the inbodied help achieve one’s aspriations?
There is a mission in inbodied interaction: #makeNormalBetter by helping people reconnect with how they feel and enable them to gain the knowledge skills and practice to access feeling better for themselves (this is what the in5 is about -and here’s a pre-print of a late breaking work that details this a little more.)
There are currently three strands to inbodied interaction reserach
1) FUNDAMENTAL INBODIED STUDIES getting into the physio-neuro-kinesio etc parts of the body in order to understand better options and opportunities for design. For instance: focussing on how breathing works to understand how we might want to engage better with so-called stress. Or how understanding the vagus nerve pathway between the gut and brain may help inform design opportunities to use design new kinds of food support interactions to reduce depression. Turns out HCI is a great driver for fundamental resaerch that benefits HCI and related disciplines. Hence a goal here is to help make that education into the body more accessbile. 2) TRANSLATION TO APPLICATION - based on fundamental inbodied sciences, how traslate those insights into approaches that can help people FEEL better, and have heuristics of what to DO to feel better? THese questions are related to the Design Challenges we’ll be exploring in the workshop.
THe approach here also challenges taking a strictly rational approach to health and wellbeing in partiucular (eg: here’s data about your eating, now make a decision to do something about it). It also focuses on translating externalised awareness (what we’ve called “outsourcing awareness to hardware sensors”) and building designs to re-build internal awareness. (decision making is not a strictly rational process)
3) INDIVIDUAL TO INFRASTRUCTURE - While individual applications from Inbodied Interaction challenge a strictly rationalist approach to design, it also seeks to challenge to core HCI focus in health and wellbeing that focuses on the Individual rather than Infrastructure. We are keen to explore the question: how do we design environtments/practices to support Inbodied Interaction aspirations of helping people FEEL and PERFORM better? How do we design assets for communities to support and sustain their own health and wellbeing
Hope to see you at our workshop - ACCESSw32
(all photo © by mc 2019)