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Abstract
Due to social distancing restrictions caused by COVID-19, people worldwide have relied on communication technology for staying connected with their loved ones. Despite many benefits, these technologies are inadequate substitutes for the feeling of connectedness that is experienced during face-to-face interaction.
In this thesis, informed by enactivism and embodiment theory, I argue that to design for connectedness we must stop reducing human communication to the information-transmission paradigm used in computer-mediated communication (CMC). While the notion of embodiment has been widely accepted by human-computer interaction (HCI) practitioners, the idea that human communication takes place through sending/receiving and encoding/decoding information has not yet been explicitly challenged.
I have designed Undula, an experimental interface to explore the communicative potential of physical movement, in this case the movement afforded by a rocking chair (teaser available at https://vimeo.com/365451168). The interface consists of two large-scale custom-made rocking chairs. The rocking movement of each chair is sonified, allowing a pair of participants to communicate over distance via a co-created rhythmic soundscape. The interface was tested and evaluated in controlled environments over three stages in both immediate (same room) and distant (separate rooms) settings.
This practice-based design exploration contributes to knowledge in several ways:
- It focuses on the ethereal concept of mediated connectedness, which has not previously been explicitly defined within HCI research.
- It proposes a conceptual shift from communication technology for information processing to communication technology for dynamic embodied expression. In doing it compares the conceptual understanding of these two schemes as situated respectively within the 2nd (interaction as information exchange) and 3rd (phenomenologically situated and embodied interactions) HCI paradigms.
- It discusses design approaches for facilitating intersubjective dynamic interactions and affective engagements through movement coordination; these are not instructed or gamified but are implicitly facilitated through the interface design of a rocking chair device.
- It updates previous studies by testing whether bidirectional coordinated movement can facilitate mutual feelings of connectedness between pairs of people over distance, without visual feedback or other external stimuli to aid synchronisation.
