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.
Over the last 15 years, HCI and Interaction Design have experienced a “material turn” characterised by a growing interest in the materiality of technology and computation, and in methods that support exploring, envisioning, and crafting with and through materials. The community has experienced a similar turn focused on the body, on how to best design for and from a first-person, lived experience, and the moving and sensual body. In this workshop, we focus on the intersection of these two turns. The emerging developments in multimodal interfaces open up opportunities to bring in materiality to the digital world as well as to transform the materiality of objects and bodies in the real-world, including the materiality of our own body. The different sensory qualities of (touchable and untouchable, physical and digital) objects and bodies, including our own, can be brought into the design of digital technologies to enrich, augment, and transform embodied experiences. In this “materials revolution” [15], what are the current theories, approaches, methods and tools that emphasise the critical role of materiality to body-based interactions with technology?
To explore this, in this workshop we will focus on five related themes: material enabling expression, material as a catalyst for human action, material enabling reflection and awareness, material enabling transformation and material supporting the design process for the re-creation of the existing and the yet-to-exist. This workshop with technology presentations, panel sessions with experts, and multidisciplinary discussions will: (i) bring together researchers who work on (re)creating sensory properties of materials through technology with those who investigate experiential effects of materials and material-enabled interactions, (ii) discuss methods, opportunities, difficulties in designing materiality and material-enabled interactions, and (iii) form a multidisciplinary community to build synergies and collaborations.
This workshop aims to build a community and open the design space for materiality and material-enabled body-based multisensory experiences by integrating research from various perspectives.
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)
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.
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.
We were featured in Órbita Laika, the TV program! Abracadabra was Episode 2 of Season 8 and focused on revealing how science creates illusions that defy our perception. We shared an overview of our experiments and prototypes for sensory-driven Body Transformation Experiences.
As defined by themselves, Órbita Laika is a TV program that disseminates fun science for all audiences. Órbita Laika has been exploring the magic of science for eight seasons with a variety of topics and all kinds of curiosities from experts who help viewers understand their environment and open their minds to new experiences and knowledge.
The presentations concerned movement-based interaction, from different perspectives: user-centered and participatory design studies, interactive machine learning tools and applications covering arts (dance and music), education and health.
Ana’s keynote led the theme of Learning or Re-learning Movements and presented an overview of sound-driven body transformation experiences.
During the 2022 European Researcher’s Night in Madrid, Ana Tajadura-Jiménez participated in Teatro y ciencia: más allá del bienestar (Theater and Science: beyond well-being). This event was a popular science show focused on various aspects related to our well-being, such as water, pollution caused by airplanes, the health of our cells and the impact of technology on the perception of our body. This event alternated theatrical scenes with talks by UC3M research staff on UC3M scientific projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC).
The talk by Ana was titled Tecnologías para experiencias sensoriales de transformación del cuerpo y aplicaciones para la salud (Technologies for sensory-driven body-transformation experiences and health applications).
You can find more information in the following links:
