Abstract
To build creative links between ethnographic findings of bodily practices and design, we developed so called body cards to document experiential qualities to be used in idea generation and early prototyping. These focus on the stages of a design process that involves investigating a use domain and making such knowledge relevant and usable for design. This involves challenges of effectively describing – with theoretical and empirical grounding – how bodily action and experience actually occur, in relation to people, artefacts, and activities. We discuss challenges in bridging between ethnographic findings and design of technologies for bodily experiences. Designing for the body in interaction is then not only about better ways of sensing bodily actions, but just as much about integrating these in the space of social interaction.
Highlights
We present a design process in which a set of so called body cards was designed as a means of explicitly bringing in bodily experiential qualities as central elements
The design process resulted in a tangible device that allows groups of visitors to an art hall to share their experiences via physical traces that are created through touching and moving their device in various ways which has been presented in further detail elsewhere (Laaksolahti et al 2011)
In the design process we focused on how bodily action can be taken as essential to everyday experiences and made relevant in design
Summary
We present a design process in which a set of so called body cards was designed as a means of explicitly bringing in bodily experiential qualities as central elements. The body cards evolved during the design process as means to support designers firstly, to focus on users’ engaged bodily action in designing interactive artefacts for social experiences, and secondly, to tailor the interaction in accordance to the specific circumstances of a particular unique real-life setting. Our focus is in line with research work that has investigated physically engaging activities with the purpose of teasing out design relevant experiential qualities such as (Höök, 2010; Tholander & Johansson, 2010). We present the development of body cards and go into detail on how two of these were designed based on a theoretically grounded videobased interaction analysis. We end by discussing challenges in finding essential experiential bodily qualities in empirical material, and how to make those useful and relevant in a design
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