Good morning, afternoon, evening, middle of the night, or whenever you happen to be watching this.
Welcome to “articulating soma experiences using trajectories” by me, Paul Tennent
and a co-author list that makes the new paper format look awful.
Suffice to say it’s principally a collaboration between the mixed reality lab at Nottingham,
and the soma design lab at KTH.
I thought a good way to do this would be to just unpick the title. So let’s start with
“soma experiences”
With apologies to everybody watching this that knows what they’re getting into, let’s
just briefly define that.
A soma experience, is, well, really any experience, but considered through the lens of one’s
somaesthetic appreciation.
I’m aware that hasn’t necessarily made things better, but somaesthetic appreciation
is a holistic, first person way of considering how one’s body and mind interact in unison
with the world and experiences one might be having.
Time for the practical.
Stand up and move your chair out the way. Go on – I’m sure you’ve been sitting
in it watching videos for a while now.
Now, join me sitting on the floor.
There you go.
So, How are you sitting?
Did you cross your legs like a school pupil at story time, Like I did?
Are you stretched out languidly like a Roman having dinner?
Are you still on your chair too embarrassed to do this on a video call?
How does it feel?
I’m going to guess that the answer to that question is something like “fine” or “stupid”
or “uncomfortable”.
That’s not a terribly rich description.
What if we then tried to unpack a bit more of it?
Were you a bit stiff before you sat down?
Are you stretching muscles that you haven’t stretched much today?
Did your knees crack as you went down like mine did?
Where is the pressure on your body?
Which parts of the body are touching the floor?
Are you in balance, or perhaps shifted over to one side?
Are you happy doing it or did you feel a bit silly?
Are you still sitting or have you given up and returned to the familiarity of your desk?
The point I’m making here is that it’s difficult to describe a soma experience – to
articulate it.
With soma design – a method of designing experiences from a soma perspective – becoming
more popular we suggest that we need more instruments for articulating soma experiences.
That’s not to say they don’t exist at all.
One method that is used in soma design for example is body maps.
They are a before and after ‘snapshot’ of the body, and provide a very rich way to
articulate the experience.
However, this approach lacks temporal granularity.
You’ve been sitting on the floor for a couple of minutes now. Has anything changed?
Are you more or less comfortable?
Let’s mix it up with some star jumps!
Come on – you don’t get nearly enough exercise at these remote conferences!
Ready?
Okay.
I hope you were joining me for that!
Now, sit back down.
Our soma experience has gotten more complex.
We sat down, got used to it, we stood up, we did some star jumps and then we sat down
again.
So, how did that feel?
I'm guessing answer now might be a little more complex?
The experience wasn’t static - it had beats – different moments.
So how to articulate how we felt at those different points?
Well, let’s look at a tactic for doing exactly that.
Trajectories is a concept in HCI by which we can describe an experience.
They’ve been applied to lots of domains: art, museums, education, UI design and so
on and they are a powerful descriptive tool.
We propose that they may also be used to articulate soma experiences – hence the paper title
– and to help deliver that temporal context.
Let’s unpick the experience we’ve just shared - or that I’ve just done while you
all stare blankly back at me – since I don’t know in advance how participative my audience
is going to be!
Lets start with an x-axis. We’ll call that time.
Now we’ll put the ‘beats’ onto it: sitting down, standing up, doing the star jumps, sitting
back down.
So what to put on the Y-axis?
Well this is where we let our creativity out.
What would you like to describe?
How about anxiousness? – that’s a fun one.
I was pretty trepidacious before we started this – I’m making a video after all and
doing something quite unusual, so we’ll start that pretty high.
As I sat on the floor and talked to you, I got used to it, I’ve done public speaking
before – this is fine.
Then I knew the star jumps were coming, so my anxiousness builds a bit towards that.
Then I was too busy doing them to care what it looked like so it just descends again.
Finally I sit back down and relax. That’s the worst part over – except now I'm panicking
about how much time I have left.
So, what we have here then is a rich description in diagrammatic form of my anxiousness through
this experience.
I could just as easily have plotted anything from physical things like the pain in my thighs
from trying to do star jumps and stay in the frame,
or the embarrassment of making a fool of myself,
to the sense of connectedness I have with you as my audience.
There’s lots more in the paper,
including an in depth discussion of several different experiences plotted in different
dimensions,
including comfortable-uncomfortable, familiar-strange, and inside-outside,
discussion of how different dimensions interact with each other
and much more about how this approach might be used in practice.
And with that, we’re done. You may return to your chair, if you haven’t already, and
I will see you next time!