Cross-dressing and border crossing: Exploring experience methods across disciplines

design methods, concept design, experience design, interaction design, interdisciplinary methods, interdisciplinary collaboration, experience prototyping, experience modeling

Wo. Defy - designing wearable technology in the context of historical cultural resistance practices.

This paper presents the design process and technical development of Wo.Defy, an interactive kinetic garment that explores a suffragette cultural critique of the 'Self-Combing Sisters', a group of women in early twentieth century Chinese society who challenged and questioned the role of women's agency.Through elements of self-connection with hair and breath, Wo.Defy investigates intimacy with natural materials and technology that are close to one's skin, and provokes self-actuation through critique of social expectation within one's culture. We gathered feedback from participants at 5 exhibitions through open-ended interviews. Self-reported experience illustrated that wearable interaction can support self-reflection contextualized through cultural artifacts such as interactive clothing

Wo. Defy - designing wearable technology in the context of historical cultural resistance practices.

This paper presents the design process and technical development of Wo.Defy, an interactive kinetic garment that explores a suffragette cultural critique of the 'Self-Combing Sisters', a group of women in early twentieth century Chinese society who challenged and questioned the role of women's agency.Through elements of self-connection with hair and breath, Wo.Defy investigates intimacy with natural materials and technology that are close to one's skin, and provokes self-actuation through critique of social expectation within one's culture. We gathered feedback from participants at 5 exhibitions through open-ended interviews. Self-reported experience illustrated that wearable interaction can support self-reflection contextualized through cultural artifacts such as interactive clothing

Assessing the reliability of the Laban Movement Analysis system

The Laban Movement Analysis system (LMA) is a widely used system for the description of human movement. Here we present results of an empirical analysis of the reliability of the LMA system. Firstly, we developed a directed graph-based representation for the formalization of LMA. Secondly, we implemented a custom video annotation tool for stimulus presentation and annotation of the formalized LMA. Using these two elements, we conducted an experimental assessment of LMA reliability. In the experimental assessment of the reliability, experts–Certified Movement Analysts (CMA)–were tasked with identifying the differences between a “neutral” movement and the same movement executed with a specific variation in one of the dimensions of the LMA parameter space. The videos represented variations on the pantomimed movement of knocking at a door or giving directions. To be as close as possible to the annotation practice of CMAs, participants were given full control over the number of times and order in which they viewed the videos. The LMA annotation was captured by means of the video annotation tool that guided the participants through the LMA graph by asking them multiple-choice questions at each node. Participants were asked to first annotate the most salient difference (round 1), and then the second most salient one (round 2) between a neutral and gesture and the variation. To quantify the overall reliability of LMA, we computed Krippendorff’s α. The quantitative data shows that the reliability, depending on how the two rounds are integrated, ranges between a weak and an acceptable reliability of LMA. The analysis of viewing behavior showed that, despite relatively large differences at the inter-individual level, there is no simple relationship between viewing behavior and individual performance (quantified as the level of agreement of the individual with the dominant rating). This research advances the state of the art in formalizing and implementing a reliability measure for the Laban Movement Analysis system. The experimental study we conducted allows identifying some of the strengths and weaknesses of the widely used movement coding system. Additionally, we have gained useful insights into the assessment procedure itself

Pillows as adaptive interfaces in ambient environments

We have developed a set of small interactive throw pillows containing intelligent touch-sensing surfaces, in order to explore new ways to model the environment, participants, artefacts, and their interactions, in the context of expressive non-verbal interaction. We present the overall architecture of the environment, describing a model of the user, the interface (the interactive pillows and the devices it can interact with) and the context engine. We describe the representation and process modules of the context engine and demonstrate how they support real-time adaptation. We present an evaluation of the current prototype and conclude with plans for future work

Haplós: Vibrotactile somaesthetic technology for body awareness

Inspired by somatic methodologies and neurophysiology, Haplós is a low-cost, wearable technology that applies vibrotactile patterns to the skin, can be incorporated in existing clothing and implements, and can be programmed and activated remotely. We review existing vibrotactile technologies and known uses of vibrotactile stimuli; describe the hardware, textile, and software components of Haplós; describe results from a quasi-experimental workshop to evaluate Haplós; and discuss future research and development directions

m+m:A novel Middleware for Distributed, Movement based Interactive Multimedia Systems

Embodied interaction has the potential to provide users with uniquely engaging and meaningful experiences. m+m: Movement + Meaning middleware is an open source software framework that enables users to construct real-time, interactive systems that are based on movement data. The acquisition, processing, and rendering of movement data can be local or distributed, real-time or off-line. Key features of the m+m middleware are a small footprint in terms of computational resources, portability between different platforms, and high performance in terms of reduced latency and increased bandwidth. Examples of systems that can be built with m+m as the internal communication middleware include those for the semantic interpretation of human movement data, machine-learning models for movement recognition, and the mapping of movement data as a controller for online navigation, collaboration, and distributed performance

Next steps for Human-Computer Integration

Human-Computer Integration (HInt) is an emerging paradigm in which computational and human systems are closely interwoven. Integrating computers with the human body is not new. However, we believe that with rapid technological advancements, increasing real-world deployments, and growing ethical and societal implications, it is critical to identify an agenda for future research. We present a set of challenges for HInt research, formulated over the course of a five-day workshop consisting of 29 experts who have designed, deployed, and studied HInt systems. This agenda aims to guide researchers in a structured way towards a more coordinated and conscientious future of human-computer integration