Abstract: Body maps are a popular tool in body-centric design, facilitating a sensitization and expression of felt sensations and emotions. Yet, they also bring forth assumptions about the body and our somatic experience. Based on an open and exploratory design ideation inquiry, we have started to explore how body maps could be advanced so as to cater to a plurality of bodies and aspects that shape somatic experiences. We present an annotated portfolio featuring six design themes (temporality, sociality, representativeness, granularity, context, and focus). These themes help us examine implicit assumptions of current body maps, and offer possible alternatives for what future body maps could become. We contribute our themes, inspirational design ideas and practical design techniques to help craft novel body maps. Our contributions can serve as inspiration to others, towards advancing body maps as a research tool for body-centric interaction design.
This study aims to investigate whether individuals with subthreshold eating disorder (ED) symptoms show differences in the integration of proprioceptive and auditory cues in relation to body representation, as compared to healthy controls. This will be examined by focusing on two different body parts (finger and waist) with different levels of emotional significance for individuals with EDs. Participants will be screened for ED symptoms and divided into groups accordingly. The strength of the illusions will be measured using estimations of body part position and size, as well as self-report questionnaires. Regression analysis will be used to assess the predictive role of susceptibility to the body illusions on interoceptive body awareness and sensory-processing sensitivity. The results of this study may have implications for understanding the underlying mechanisms of body image disturbances in EDs, and inform the development of clinical interventions for individuals with subthreshold EDs.
Ana Tajadura-Jiménez presented The Hearing Body: Sound-driven Body Transformation Experiences Applications for Emotional and Physical Health in the C4DM-CogSci Workshop on Body-centred perspectives on human-human and human-machine interaction. It occurred at the Queen Mary University of London, on February 8th, 2023.
The following was the abstract of the talk:
Body perceptions are important for people’s motor, social and emotional functioning. Critically, neuroscientific research has shown that body perceptions are not fixed, but are continuously updated through sensorimotor information. In this talk, I will present work from our group on how sound and other sensory feedback on one’s body and actions can be used to alter body perception, creating Body Transformation Experiences. I will talk about how neuroscientifically grounded insights that body perceptions are continuously updated through sensorimotor information may contribute to the design of novel body-centred technologies to support people’s needs and for behaviour change. I will then present various studies from our current project, Magic OutFit, aimed to inform the design of wearable technology in which sensory-driven changes in body perception are used to enhance behavioural patterns and emotional states in the context of exertion. I will discuss how apart from the focus on real-life applications, novel technologies for body sensing and sensory feedback may also become a research tool for investigating how emotional and multisensory processes shape body perception. I will conclude by identifying new challenges and opportunities that this line of work presents, some of which we are addressing in our current ERC project BODYinTRANSIT.
We are holding a workshop to experience first hand and to explore how we can design multisensory interactions with immersive data representations in a different and innovative way, in particular, by using embodied design methods.
In the workshop, we will experience and explore a live installation of an immersive data representation, enacted by a dance group, who will respond to the presence and action of people in the room. Through our joint experience, we will reflect and ideate new ways of bodily interacting with immersive data representations.
When is the workshop? The workshop will be held next Thursday, January 26th at 15:00 (duration ~3h)
Get up to 20 euros for your participation! Are you over 18 years old? Would you like to help us in our research on technology and body perception? We are looking for participants for our study on body perception where we use sound and a suit with sensors.
If you would like to participate we will ask you to answer a few questions about yourself, your physical activity and eating habits to confirm eligibility. Those selected will be invited to participate in a session of maximum 90 minutes. Sessions will take place starting January 19, 2023.
The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) nominated Ana Tajadura-Jiménez to be featured in AcademiaNet, a database of profiles of excellent female researchers from all disciplines. In this way, Ana joins the list of more than 3600 outstanding women researchers from Europe and beyond.
Women are still seriously under-represented in leadership positions in academia. Only 26 % of professorships in Europe are held by women; in some countries, the share of women is even lower (SheFigures 2021). The figures are similarly low for key committees and commissions that decide on research awards, the appointment of professors and research funding. There is now a consensus in politics and science that the under-representation of women in academic leadership positions represents an untapped potential. However, there is a lack of tools to help decision-makers find proven female experts.
AcademiaNet is intended to be such an instrument. The database contains the profiles of women academics from all disciplines. Decision-makers can use the database to search for the best in their field. This makes it easier to fill scientific committees with female experts, to ask female speakers for a panel and to identify candidates for appointment procedures and awards. AcademiaNet is also a useful tool for journalists and conference organizers who are looking for proven female experts.
Ana Tajadura-Jiménez has joined the list of Oustanding Women Scientists and Innovators (Científicas e Innovadoras), which is an initiative by the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación), through its Women and Science Unit (Unidad de Mujeres y Ciencia) and in collaboration with the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología, FECYT).
This platform makes the work of Spanish women scientists visible as a reference in the world of research.
Identity and perception of the digital and virtual self was a panel discussion at the Madrid in Game Summit 2022. The panel was organized by Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and featured Dan Casas from that university, Chus Rodríguez from Skydance Animation, Alonso Becerril from La tecnocreativa, and our own Ana Tajadura-Jiménez.
Bodily awareness is one of the most interesting and enigmatic forms of experience. Our earliest and most pervasive form of conscious experience, it also arguably remains the most private. Bodily awareness has also long played a central role in the study of the mind and self-consciousness, and is fundamental to much current philosophical and psychological research.
The Routledge Handbook of Bodily Awareness is an outstanding reference source to this fascinating subject. Comprising over thirty chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook is divided into seven parts.
Within these sections specific topics covered include bodily ownership, personal identity, self-consciousness, body modelling in robot design, body illusions, touch, proprioception, phantom limb syndrome, pain, eating disorders, out-of-body experiences and virtual reality. The handbook features specially commissioned contributions from researchers in a wide array of disciplines, whilst being accessible to readers with any disciplinary background. It also includes an interdisciplinary introduction, written by the editors, tying together the central themes with particular attention to the interaction between conceptual, technological and empirical issues.
Music makes us dance and move, but can sounds do more for our body? We may easily think that hearing is the least relevant modality for our sense of bodily self, compared, for instance, to touch, vision and interoception. Yet audition provides rich information about what is happening inside and crucially outside of our bodies: we hear ourselves breathing, or our joints crack; we hear our hands clapping against each other or stroking a piece of velvet; we hear the sounds of our footsteps mixing with those of others as we go down the stairs. Rarely is there an action or event that we are involved in which is silent, and yet audition remains relatively ignored as a contributor to our sense of self.
This chapter aims to correct this oversight, by highlighting the surprising but also special contributions that audition brings to our sense of self. We first show how certain sounds get specifically referred to our own bodies, through other senses and our motor actions, and come to shape how we represent ourselves. Rather than cataloguing various effects, we highlight what is distinctive or superior in the auditory contributions to our body representations, compared to other senses. Conceptually, sounds are not enduring objects but are bounded in time; the sounds we produce also occur through an interaction between ourselves and another object or surface. Audition therefore tells us about our bodies as a source of events, in relation to something else, rather than informing us about our body as an independent or stable object. Informationally, audition constantly monitors a full 360-degree space around us, automatically capturing events that happen to and because of us with high temporal resolution, while flexibly combining and segregating them from the sounds produced by others or external events. Together, these various characteristics can help us to identify the various clinical and practical applications where audition shows or can show its distinctive and important contribution to our body representations.
We led a workshop titled Design interactive technology that changes how you feel about your body and activates you physically in XXII Semana de la Ciencia y la Innovación de Madrid, organized by the Community of Madrid through the Fundación para el Conocimiento madri+d.
This participatory workshop focuses on exploring and designing in groups sensory technology to promote physical activity. In the workshop, participants are invited to explore how certain sensations of some materials and technologies affect the perception of our body and invite us to move (to be physically active, for example). Designs made in our lab will be tested and we will reflect as a group on what works and what doesn’t for each of us when it comes to getting active and engaging in physical activity. In addition, we will co-design adaptations or even new designs using the materials and sensory technology.
