Dance and Movement-Led Research for Designing and Evaluating Wearable Human-Computer Interfaces

Movement research and practice in the context of wearable technologies and human-computer interaction (HCI) shifts the design paradigm to the lived body. Human movement is characterized by sense, intention and expressiveness. Designing HCI from this standpoint opens up new possibilities to make computational devices and applications more accessible and integrated. This work presents an iterative, collaborative, and cross-disciplinary approach using wearable sensor bands in an open-ended performative exploration in exchange with a professional dancer. The goal is to understand the benefits and challenges of using movement-centered tools originating from dance practice and movement research and how they might feed back into the design, development and evaluation process of embodied technologies to improve human-computer interactions. Movement analysis systems and motion computation models are reviewed and leveraged in an interactive audiovisual system, with focus on using force-sensing resistors for low-level motion descriptors and Laban Movement Analysis for higher-level movement features. The artistic methodology, which combines practice and research, results, discussion of the iterative and collaborative process, and the final system architecture are the main topics presented in the paper.