Hi!
My name is Catarina and I’m here to present the Wearable choreographer on behalf of my
co-authors Ozgun Kilic Afsar and Sarah Fdili Alaoui
Dancers mainly rely on video to learn and share their dancing.
While video can be useful it does not really inform on all the inner movement qualities nor the
kinaesthetic sensations that exist in dance
Meanwhile, a new kind of robotics has emerged, which some of you may be familiar with.
They are called soft robots and they are usually made of soft materials which makes them light
and flexible and very interesting for wearables.
This technology is growing at a really impressive rate but there is not yet a very comprehensive
understanding of what are its opportunities for HCI research and for dance applications in particular.
So that's where our study lies, at the intersection of all of this. Basically it brings forth a novel
application of this technology while exploring new opportunities for implementing wearable
design into dance practice.
We're committed in this work to a research through design method, by taking a critical
look at how our design choices provided different experiences.
We are also committed to a somaesthetic design approach. So we decided to center our attention on the
soma or the living sensing body.
For the whole design process I, the first author, followed a first person or an auto-biographical approach.
I explored how different technologies were able to give me different directional cues,
making use of my own background as a swing and jazz and tap dancer for maybe 10 years now along with
the somatic learnings that I did I made throughout the design process.
So I have told you. I chose to work with soft robotics.
More specifically, fiber reinforced pneumatic soft robotics.
Within Fiber reinforced, I produced three different kinds of samples:
First I explored sewn samples,
next I moved on to knitted and woven samples and finally McKibben muscles
In all of these a hollow silicone tubing is enclosed in a layer or more of fibers
When we inflate that silicone tubing with high pressure air, the tubing expands creating
different movements and altering the sample´s shape.
I produced and iterated on a number of samples for each of these kinds where I explored a lot of different
variables. But I wanna talk to you about the third one, the Mckibben muscles.
So when they are inflated, they contract in length and they produce a high contraction force.
just like you can see in this little video.
When I attached one of these mckibben muscles to a jointed object. So, I first I did so with a stapler, then with a 3d printed
jointed structure and later on my own leg. Because of this contraction, I observed a bending motion.
Like you can see these videos.
Next I decided I wanted to combine them with textiles.
I used woven textiles which are inextensible and Knitted
textiles which have unidirectional stretch. I used them and combined them to create a sleeve for one mckibben
muscle. When I inflated this muscle, because of the difference in stretchability, I observed again a bending motion.
Next, I made these muscles double. Just to have a higher contraction force and I attached them to a jointed object,
So I created a sleeve for a stapler.
Here I obtained the working principle of our wearable.
Except in our wearable the object is actually our leg and I placed one of these double muscles on each of
the three joints I wanted to bend: the hip, the ankle and the knee joint.
Now, how did I actually arrive here, at the concept of the wearable choreographer?
As a dancer myself, I saw a really great potential in translating both the visual and the physical cues that
we get from a choreographer into a wearable.
Once I understood both the potential and the limitations of this technology I chose to design a prototype
that would provide me with movement cues as guidance in
my own practice - so essentially I wanted to try and embed some sort of “choreographer” into my own modified garment.
Having that in mind as well as my own dance training largely that's focused on footwork, I decided
to create a wearable that would give me timing and movement cues through actuation on
my leg.
So that’s basically all the steps that led to the design of the wearable! Let's look at it.
It includes three mckibben muscles bundles. The bundles are double, they are composed of two muscles each, just like
previously. And I strategically placed to be able to bend the three joints: the hip, the knee and the ankle.
These bundles were covered in a two layer textile interface with the different stretchability in the different textiles, just like
previously. The size of the whole wearable is adjustable to different users since it is fixated
around the leg and the hip using velcro.
Now, to trigger the inflation and the deflation of this system, I
needed a pneumatic control system. Such a system had to
include an air source and a valve that could orchestrate the
inflation and the deflation of the three different muscles individually.
This whole system also needed to be capable of enough pressure to
actually inflate the muscles.
In our case, the minimum pressure was around 4 bars.
For the air source I used an electronic tire pump which then supplied air to an arduino based valve
that did meet these requirements and could feed these three muscles individually.
So you can see in this video an example of the working prototype.
Next, in order to assess how our wearable actually impacts dance practitioners,
we invited four dancers to try it.
For them to experience it, I created a little routine.
First they went through a short body scan meditation. Then, they put down on body
maps their bodily sensations.
Finally they got to put on the garment and noise cancelling gear. Because the pump is actually quite loud.
Only then did they get to dance with the wearable.
After dancing, they filled out body maps again, so we could compare them and
answered a number of questions about their experience.
From all this data which were videos and body maps, interviews, notes... We analyzed it all thematically
And from there we gathered three key insights on how the garment influenced them.
First, from their responses, we identified a common feeling of
being restricted by the wearable.
Either they didn't feel comfortable contradicting it, they felt frozen in a position,
they didn't want to damage it… Ultimately they were uncomfortable and they felt
their range of motion limited.
However, from this restriction came a place of creativity. They had to find movements that were comfortable
They had to pay higher attention to their body and they had to scan their body for the wearable’s actions while moving.
They had fun being challenged into expressing themselves in new ways and they were
quite excited to include such technologies in the future in their practises.
Another interesting thing was how the dancers often described the garment as wanting them to do something,
or having some sort of agenda. That ended up giving the garment its own agency in their eyes and in their descriptions.
This raised such interesting questions around bodily manipulation and feelings of invasion
shared among them, which paves the way for important privacy and ethical disputes conversations.
Although soft robotics research has definitely yielded extraordinarily promising results
coming from people with such varied backgrounds, I decided I can't really go without highlighting also the
difficulties, the frustrations and the steep learning curve that does exist for fabricating such systems.
If I run you through the design process...
From ordering and iterating on different components and materials and sizes
That can make the design process quite lengthy and also quite expensive.
Besides that, like I mentioned, I was trying to follow
quite a somaesthetic based approach. But the required amount of time for
on-the-table fabrication and for technique mastery
before being able to test samples on my body lead to
a very disembodied fabrication process.
As was its aim, this study underlined simultaneously the promising future opportunities of wearable
technologies in the dance practice as well as the challenges that it does still presents.
While the design of soft robotics and its applications to movement-related practices
are still at its debut, our design provoked a range of rich and deep somatic reflections
on how these technologies can be integrated to guide and inspire people’s embodied practices,
just like a choreographer might do.
Ultimately, we hope this study will inspire others to experiment with different wearable
technologies to support and reshape dance.
Thank you.
That was the Wearable Choreographer.