A framework for graceful interaction for web interface design / Wan Norizan Wan Hashim

It is argued that the design of life experiences with digital artifact should be aligned with the rich experience of the physical sensory life. The emphasis of functionality and efficiency of digital artifact is currently being infiltrated with new design criteria such as friendliness, playfulness, aesthetically pleasing and emotionally satisfying. Designing for aesthetic interaction is designing for a beauty that is rewarding in itself leading to aesthetic experience, which involves bodily skills and emotional sensitivity. Following the argument that form in an aesthetic experience has deep roots in organic bodily rhythms and the social conditions which help structure them, we conceptualize graceful interaction as a form to enrich user experience. Using the design science approach, graceful interaction is conceptualized through the abstraction of graceful dance movement that was derived from an interview with an art performance expert. The graceful dance movement elements is then mapped into the set of graceful interaction design elements obtained from the integration of Laban Effort Movement Theory with effort qualities of movement by Bacigalupi. This mapping is the basis of the prescription of the graceful interaction design framework that also encompasses the criteria of movement quality. The framework was then validated through experimental work

As You Are, So Shall You Move Your Head: A System-Level Analysis between Head Movements and Corresponding Traits and Emotions

Identifying physical traits and emotions based on system-sensed physical activities is a challenging problem in the realm of human-computer interaction. Our work contributes in this context by investigating an underlying connection between head movements and corresponding traits and emotions. To do so, we utilize a head movement measuring device called eSense, which gives acceleration and rotation of a head. Here, first, we conduct a thorough study over head movement data collected from 46 persons using eSense while inducing five different emotional states over them in isolation. Our analysis reveals several new head movement based findings, which in turn, leads us to a novel unified solution for identifying different human traits and emotions through exploiting machine learning techniques over head movement data. Our analysis confirms that the proposed solution can result in high accuracy over the collected data. Accordingly, we develop an integrated unified solution for real-time emotion and trait identification using head movement data leveraging outcomes of our analysis.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, NSysS 201

Music Perception in Rhythmik Lessons

The teaching of rhythmics was first introduced by the Swiss pedagogue Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, as he revealed the phenomenon of mutual interaction between music and movement, thus facilitating the musical, intellectual and physical growth of students. Music is one of the basic components in the choice of means of rhythmics. The perception of music is complex and it can be viewed both from the associative and the analytical aspect. The process of music perception in rhythmics is implemented with the help of movement. By assuming that movement is the basis of all live expression, musical rhythm becomes the movement synchronizer, thus acting on the sensomotoric, cognitive and emotional level. In the rhythmics lessons at the Emils Darzins Secondary Music School for grades 1-4 the process of music perception takes place both in an associative creative and an analytical way, thus ensuring an in-depth strengthening of skills and abilities acquired through music theory lessons and implementing rhythmics through lively and jovial action. The objective is to investigate the process of perception of rhythmic music classroom: music and movement interaction. Research methods: teaching observation, content analysis, test. Research base: Emils Darzins Music School 3rd and 4th grade students - total of 17. The study involved students names have been changed

Shhh…listen to your pebble Mindfulness Education: The Relationship Between Children, Imagination, and Nature

A culture of education embedded in mind-body learning experiences and mindfulness approaches to knowledge on multiple levels through awareness has the potential to cultivate versatile and flexible social individuals who are mentally, emotionally, and intellectually “capable.” Since children experience the world primarily through their bodies, movement and interaction with the environment are a means for them to explore, find, understand, and fortify the self to better regulate their physical, emotional, and social realms so that they develop into social individuals who find value in themselves and in others. Therefore, focusing on strengthening children‟s mind-body connection through mindfulness-based practices is a topic worth investigating. Accordingly, this thesis addresses the processes of awareness in preschool children through movement and interaction with nature. The nature component is crucial because it grounds the self inside a world that is boundless yet intimate and engulfing yet comforting. Therefore, the theme of nature was incorporated throughout the thesis project. Awareness and openness, particularly in preschool children, begins in noticing and caring not only for themselves but for others – people, animals, and “things.” Thus I created 3 activities – nature walks, stone building, and mindful movement –while observing the ways children behaved throughout each activity. The gathered observations were analyzed and related back to the importance and benefits of mindfulness education. The goal was to foster intentional attention and sense of awareness while strengthening the mind-body connection. This study was qualitative, multidisciplinary, and experiential – an exploration based on observations of ongoing activities in the classroom – and was not intended to measure outcomes but rather document and record the process, including the children‟s verbal, physical, and symbolic expression of their experiences

Exploring the Affective Loop

Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction

Designing gestures for affective input: an analysis of shape, effort and valence

We discuss a user-centered approach to incorporating affective expressions in interactive applications, and argue for a design that addresses both body and mind. In particular, we have studied the problem of finding a set of affective gestures. Based on previous work in movement analysis and emotion theory [Davies, Laban and Lawrence, Russell], and a study of an actor expressing emotional states in body movements, we have identified three underlying dimensions of movements and emotions: shape, effort and valence. From these dimensions we have created a new affective interaction model, which we name the affective gestural plane model. We applied this model to the design of gestural affective input to a mobile service for affective messages

Musical Robots For Children With ASD Using A Client-Server Architecture

Presented at the 22nd International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-2016)People with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are known to have difficulty recognizing and expressing emotions, which affects their social integration. Leveraging the recent advances in interactive robot and music therapy approaches, and integrating both, we have designed musical robots that can facilitate social and emotional interactions of children with ASD. Robots communicate with children with ASD while detecting their emotional states and physical activities and then, make real-time sonification based on the interaction data. Given that we envision the use of multiple robots with children, we have adopted a client-server architecture. Each robot and sensing device plays a role as a terminal, while the sonification server processes all the data and generates harmonized sonification. After describing our goals for the use of sonification, we detail the system architecture and on-going research scenarios. We believe that the present paper offers a new perspective on the sonification application for assistive technologies

eMoto - Affectively Involving both Body and Mind

It is known that emotions are experienced by both body and mind. Oftentimes, emotions are evoked by sub-symbolic stimuli, such as colors, shapes, gestures, or music. We have built eMoto, a mobile service for sending affective mes-sages to others, with the explicit aim of addressing such sensing. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interac-tion pulls the user into an embodied ‘affective loop’. We present a user study of eMoto where 12 out of 18 subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interac-tion. The study also shows that the designed ‘openness’ and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and under-stood by our subjects

Empathy, engagement, entrainment: the interaction dynamics of aesthetic experience

A recent version of the view that aesthetic experience is based in empathy as inner imitation explains aesthetic experience as the automatic simulation of actions, emotions, and bodily sensations depicted in an artwork by motor neurons in the brain. Criticizing the simulation theory for committing to an erroneous concept of empathy and failing to distinguish regular from aesthetic experiences of art, I advance an alternative, dynamic approach and claim that aesthetic experience is enacted and skillful, based in the recognition of others’ experiences as distinct from one’s own. In combining insights from mainly psychology, phenomenology, and cognitive science, the dynamic approach aims to explain the emergence of aesthetic experience in terms of the reciprocal interaction between viewer and artwork. I argue that aesthetic experience emerges by participatory sense-making and revolves around movement as a means for creating meaning. While entrainment merely plays a preparatory part in this, aesthetic engagement constitutes the phenomenological side of coupling to an artwork and provides the context for exploration, and eventually for moving, seeing, and feeling with art. I submit that aesthetic experience emerges from bodily and emotional engagement with works of art via the complementary processes of the perception–action and motion–emotion loops. The former involves the embodied visual exploration of an artwork in physical space, and progressively structures and organizes visual experience by way of perceptual feedback from body movements made in response to the artwork. The latter concerns the movement qualities and shapes of implicit and explicit bodily responses to an artwork that cue emotion and thereby modulate over-all affect and attitude. The two processes cause the viewer to bodily and emotionally move with and be moved by individual works of art, and consequently to recognize another psychological orientation than her own, which explains how art can cause feelings of insight or awe and disclose aspects of life that are unfamiliar or novel to the viewer