Beautiful dance moves

Abstract

This Creativity & Cognition 2013 workshop explores emerging methods for mapping movement, technology and computation. We invite participants that are interested in bodily experience within computational knowledge representation. The title Beautiful Dance Moves, references the challenge of representing embodied movement knowledge within computational models. While human movement itself focuses on bodily experience, developing computational models for movement requires abstraction and representation of lived embodied cognition. Mappings between movement and its rich personal and cultural meanings provide an underexplored research domain that can provide insight within computational modeling. Many fields, including Interaction Design, have been inspired by recent developments within Neuroscience validating the primacy of movement in cognitive development and human intelligence. This has spawned a growing interest in experiential principles of movement awareness and mindfulness, while simultaneously fueling the need for developing computational models that can describe movement intelligence with greater rigour. This workshop seeks to explore an equal and richly nuanced epistemological partnership between movement experience and movement cognitive and computational representation.

Embodying Embodied Design Research Techniques

“…Buur and colleagues engage the body through Object Theatre and improvisation [2], and use a range of video documentation and editing techniques to capture and communicate emerging research outcomes in the wild [27]. Johan Stjernholm [19] looks at relations between the processes of creating, performing, and perceiving aesthetic embodied practices with digital media. David Kirsh [10] explores the question of physical thinking, using the body as an instrument of cognition, and Phillip Ross [16] uses aesthetic experience as a core mechanism for design.…”

“…Typical avenues for reporting do not readily encompass the multiplicity of perspectives or the embodied nature of relevant research methods and techniques. Workshops provide an important, yet ephemeral forum through which to share methodologies (e.g., MOCO 4 , [19]). Yet the conundrum of how to tangibly and robustly transfer knowledge, over time, in ways coherent with the richness of embodied methods and experiences, remains unsolved.…”