Hi everyone.
Welcome to our presentation,
Focusing for Interaction Design: An introspective Somatic Method.
I am Claudia Núñez Pacheco from the Division of Media,
Technology and Interaction Design at KTH Sweden.
This paper was also co-authored by Lian Loke
from the Design Lab at the University of Sydney, Australia.
In this paper, we have thoroughly described
two case studies demonstrating the use of the Focusing method.
But for this presentation, I will concentrate on explaining
what is Focusing and how to apply the protocol.
Focusing is a psychosomatic method that uses inward
bodily focus to access nuanced meaning around a particular situation.
The method was created by the Austrian American philosopher Eugene Gendlin.
And here I have a little story.
When Gendlin was a kid, he and his family moved from Austria
to the United States, escaping from the Nazi regime.
As a twelve year old boy could not speak English
he was allocated to a class with younger kids.
One day,
the teacher noticed how Eugene was repeating to himself the German
word "sessel" before translating it into the English term "chair".
She asked him not to translate but instead perceive
the object as being a chair from the beginning.
This particular story was later referred to by Gendlin as the beginnings
of his interest in the connections between body, language
and the meaning.
The Focusing method is relevant for design
as we need to expand our somatic vocabulary to understand
and design for aesthetic meaningful and multi-sensory
experiences.
Here,
I present you a few facts about Focusing.
So First, it derives from phenomenology and has influenced
other methods such as micro phenomenology, for example.
It facilitates an inner dialogue directed by our bodily sensing.
The premise is clear.
*Feel first and think second*.
Focusing also functions
as a one to one dialogue, or it is facilitated
as a collective experience involving evoking a situation
,which is the modality I will describe in this presentation.
The aim is to find their felt-sense a revelation.
And here it is important to say that felt senses are not the same as emotions.
Emotions
can be labeled directly
through specific words encapsulating their meaning.
Felt senses are pre-linguistic, strange and imprecise and appear
when you pay close attention to what you really feel.
Felt senses manifest as metaphorical language,
escaping from common conventional ways of expressing
ideas and emotions.
If we situate Focusing within the toolkit of methods
used somatic oriented design, such as the ones that you can see here,
this belongs to those that focus on the corporeal dimension
from contemplative rather than a more active stance.
Here we have some examples of methods
that belong to those different dimensions.
The ones that I have called introspective tend to approach the body
from a contemplative stance, bringing retrospective experience
to the present moment for awareness and examination.
On the other hand, movement based methods are grounded
in reflection in action, concentrating on the present moment.
To conduct a Focusing session, you first need a facilitator who will help
participants -or designers- follow the instructions, I am about to describe.
Then, it's important to have a topic in mind.
a design brief or a concept.
In one of the case study we describe in the paper, we conducted
Focusing as an ideation method for designing better workplaces.
In this case, we first asked participants to evoke
a meaningful experience related to their workplaces, to then
explore the sense of meaningfulness through Focusing to inspire new ideas.
In the paper, we also discuss
more specifically which kinds of topics are suitable for this method.
But in general terms, we use Focusing to bring out aesthetic
and somatic qualities about the situation to inspire design.
Next, I will proceed to list the steps.
First, we start the session with a with a body scan.
Body scanning consists of a set of guided suggestions
to start becoming aware of our different body parts.
Slowly and mindfully.
So first, we make sure to ask our participants
to sit comfortably and close their eyes.
We ask them to take a deep breath every certain time
and also we ask them to feel gravity, temperature,
weight, balance, etc..
The second step is felt sensing or body
connecting with the strange wholeness of the situation explored.
This step
refers to sensations generated by, for example,
something meaningful related to the topic of exploration.
We are not naming or labelling what we feel.
Instead, we keep our sensations strange, making sure to pay
attention to how our body is feeling
those sensations.
In this third
step, the handle, we give a label to our felt sense.
We ask our participants to find a word,
a phrase, a metaphor, an image, a gesture
or any type of representation that could somehow match the wholeness
and impreciseness of the sensations from the previous step.
When we resonate,
we ask our participants to, as soon as they have
a word, phrase or metaphor, verify if that makes sense with their bodies.
Otherwise, to keep searching for something different.
Here, we are asking them to establish a generative dialogue
between their label –word, metaphor, etc- and their bodily feelings.
Finally, we invite our participants to welcome or acknowledge
and stay with the sensations for a moment,
even if it was not possible to find a handle.
And then we close the exercise, and it's essential here to do it
gently, allowing participants to slowly bring the awareness back
to their surroundings.
Here we offer some time to note down impressions and evocations from the
session.
Sometimes in this process of writing and completing
body maps felt senses crystallise.
This stage of silence and self-reflection is helpful
for both the participants and as a data collection method.
In the studies presented in the paper, we collected
anonymous data allowing participants to open up.
As a result, you get rich narratives
full of details about situations and corporeal experience.
To conclude this presentation,
I describe some of the uses of Focusing presented in the paper.
These uses are grounded in the principle of feeling first
and thinking second, promoting corporeal engagement.
First, as a data collection method,
capturing the impressions of participants around a given topic,
then as an ideation technique for grounding our deep motivations.
And finally, as a direct inspiration for design, such as in the case of SOUL,
an art installation created from some of the descriptions
generated by our participants.
Thanks very much for listening.