Hi everyone!
This late-breaking work presents our experiences from moving a course in Embodied Interaction
from campus teaching, to online teaching during the pandemic.
The authors of the paper were teachers and students at the course.
Embodied Interaction is a field of research emerging from pioneering work in the nineties.
The field is grounded in philosophical theories foregrounding embodiment as a sociophysical phenomenon,
and the role of the body in perception and meaning-making.
At Uppsala University, it is taught as a theoretical stance towards design.
For us, physical engagement is an integral part of learning to design
with embodiment in focus.
The course, which is held at masters level,
includes many elements of physical exploration, including bodystorming,
physical prototyping using sensors and actuators, and evaluations on-site,
that often are done outdoors.
The photos in this slide document such activities from previous years.
But as most other courses, this course was moved online in the spring of 2020, with very little notice.
Many things needed to be changed, to allow for the course to be given online.
In the paper, we focus on the changes made to the design project done in groups.
Changes related to the design theme, how bodystorming was done,
how prototypes were made, and how evaluations and demonstrations were moved online.
The design work centers on different themes every year, with some of the literature chosen specifically for the theme.
The theme needed to be changed, to allow for some online interaction.
The new theme became “social connectedness in times of social isolation”.
This theme opened up for engaging with both online and physical interaction.
The theme was also timely and personally relevant, which made for high engagement by the students.
While some of the physical exercises needed to be cut, the teachers considered it important to still engage in some form of bodystorming.
To our knowledge, nobody has tried doing bodystorming – as in engaging in bodily explorations – online before.
Therefore, a practice session was organised ahead of running the bodystorming for the actual design projects.
We learned even more during the design session and we wish to share some insights.
It is feasible to do bodystorming over zoom, but it must be possible for participants to move away from the camera. Hence, sound-based cues work better than visual cues.
Access to the home environment became a resource – participants could recruit everyday objects and use them in their ideation.
This, we will see, carried over to the design project.
While physical bodystorming can be highly collaborative, online bodystorming requires the guidance of a facilitator.
And finally, it is difficult to see what people do – hence, it is important to gather people’s feedback and ideas
in one way or another
In the image, we see a screenshot of a bodystorming sessionin which one of the groups involved some colleagues and teachers
and asked them to pick an object in their homes to which they attributed a certain meaning.
The participants then were asked by the facilitator to interact with said object in many different ways.
Evaluations and demonstrations were all done in a distributed manner.
The home environment continued to be an important resource, especially as it was also the targeted setting of the designs.
The participants were also recruited at a distance.
They were sometimes tasked with building their own, nonfunctional prototypes, in order to give feedback on their design and use.
This gave them better insight in the design rationale than usual,
and enabled them to add a personal touch to the prototypes, where they felt that would improve the design.
We found that indeed it is possible to include physical engagement in a meaningful way in an online course.
However, given that this was a case of ‘emergency online teaching’ and little preparation was possible,
many of the new ways of teaching and learning were in fact invented by the students.
This resulted in a high workload for them.
We hope that our experiences can provide useful insights for future courses facing similar challenges.