Lune: Ritualizing Somaesthetic Design

How can somaesthetic interaction design inform the domestic design space, in particular that of ritualization?

This project addresses a need in the home to “get-going” with effort-demanding chores or activities such as cleaning or creative projects. Often times, there is a tension between the difficulties in taking the time and making the effort, and the gratification in initiating such actions.

Lune is a concave disc that slides vertically on a rail attached to the wall. Approaching Lune, you start by gliding the disc down in a slow movement to the center of your body, feeling the mouldable qualities of the disc that welcomes touch. As the hands sink in to it, the disc can be pushed in and slid, maybe down and up, eventually ending in a full stretch above your head, where the disc docks with a magnetic pull and the disc ignites with softly blending colors. It resembles the initiating sun salutation movement in yoga practice. The gliding movement's sluggish yet yielding inertia together with the discs gelatine-y surface makes up a coherent physique which intends to encourage fulfilling bodily manifestations to take place; deriving oneself from a way of being to another; priming one into other directions through enacting the change that will be.

Furthermore, this project is a case study for how interaction designs and processes can be understood as ritualizing, with the help of religious scholar Catherine Bell’s prominent Ritual Theory and Ritual Practice [1]. Lune’s design process show how the soma design philosophy contributes key elements to ritualizing design in how it addresses our whole somatic selves: mind and body as one, linking emotion and movement to engage in how we respond to tensions in the home and beyond. In a forthcoming project, these design implications for ritualizing interaction design will be elaborated upon .

Design Process

Somaesthetic interaction design emphasizes the importance for designers of a holistic view of the body in our lived and felt experiences. It explores other ways of designing than traditional language- and symbol-based interfaces which often intends to minimize bodily effort and focuses exclusively on eyes and hands. Thus, a first-person perspective was deployed throughout the research through design process, cultivating an appreciation bodily experiences as a design resource.

Together with professional instructors, me and my design colleague engaged with Feldenkrais practice, contact improvisation, slow walks in the forest, a-labs (aesthetic laborations) [2], magic machine workshop [3], object theatre [4], interaction relabelling [5], OWL bodyProps [6], and other methods for embodied ideation, and complemented these with a body map before and after each activity to nurture our bodily awareness. Sharing these activities and reflections together with my design colleague, we began to establish a common ground of aesthetics.

In estranging ourselves to our homes, we identified a tension with clocktime and how it dominates much of our experiences in the home. Typical clocks in the home show time in a concrete manner, with detail and time passage clearly and linearly displayed. The practicality of clocktime is essential to many aspects of the modern domestic life, but we argue that this practicality is also part of a greater trouble. Does this clocktime suggest that it is through a practical lens that we should view the progression of a day and fit our experiences snugly into? Our felt experience of this is a sort of regression of possibilities to tend to whatever one fancies, to float around and to progress with the day more serenely.

At this point, when we had identified a potent tension to address through design, we turned our perspectives from what to design against, to what to design for. Our intention become to designing for being at peace with passage of time, and to compose time for yourself to do whatever you fancy.

We outlined the sequence of sensitizing, manifesting and preserving as compelling stages in strive for such attitude. In deconstructing this situation, we found parallels to Cognitive Dissonance Theory [7] and Emotion Regulation Theory [8]. The theory describes how such inconsistencies between desires or ideas motivate a person towards resolution in how they cause stress and tension in affect. The theory explains ways of how the dissonance may be addressed, engaging in a kind of emotion regulation. One can procrastinate [9], that is, intend a change but not act upon it, even though you expect to be worse off due to the delay; there could be achange of the sentiments involved, meaning, for instance, you assert that you don’t need to engage with the activity at the moment for some reason; or, there could be engagement withan act that changes the state of the external world, thereby acting towards resolution. We explored narratives in support of the latter, a more active alternative.

It was understood that to engage with the desired activity within mentioned circumstances, a transition to an attitude of "getting going" is beneficial. We outlined the sequence of sensitizing, manifesting and preservingas compelling stagesin strive for such attitude. We intended to address this through movement and material sensibilities of the interaction.

One of the main somaesthetic qualities we aimed to capture was present in the sensation of sliding the disc. The inertia in moving the disc with your hands - in extension, your arms, shoulders and back - should resemble the resistance and texture of the disc itself, as if it were gliding through the viscous material. Inertia in the sliding and changing of direction makes a monophonic piece in the union with the disc's attributes. The disc has elastic silky fabric over transparent rubber stretched across slime. We experimented with different hardnesses and amounts of slime on the acrylic disc. We sought a feeling that wouldn't swallow the hand but gently accept its landing. The smooth qualities of the fabric encourages stroking and keeps the slime tightly in place with the rubber shield.

Since there is no right or wrong way to perform the movement within the limits of the culmination, one can compose their own movements with the disc, adapting it to one's own particular soma and inclination. The interaction always varies within certain boundaries, which is where a potential of the ritual design lies. The amount of time earnestly engaged with the interaction is of significance to nurture the capacity of sensitizing oneself for a meaningful manifestation. This is encouraged with the sliding resistance, making it unsuitable for quick, mindless and casual engagement.

At the culminating moment, the disc ignites with the calm swiftness of opening eyes after sleep, filling the circle with asymmetrical blending colors. The final movement is aided by a magnet which lightly pulls the disc and the top of the frame together. This magnetism represents an aesthetic quality extracted from the initial bolidy estrangement methods, present in forms of improvised dance and contact, where it's possible to lose track of who is guiding who, similar to this magnetic sensation.

The ignition of the light symbolizes the fulfillment of the interaction and the closure of the ritual. The light later accompanies the user further with the slowly shifting colors, at a rate so slow it cannot be perceived if stared at for a short time. The light always ignites differently within a palette of colors inspired by our aesthetic vocabulary. The undulating colors remain in effect for around a couple of hours to have a substantial presence during the next activity.

Construction

The transparent slime and rubber with the white fabric stretched across clear acrylic plastic diffuses light from individually addressable LEDs. An Arduino board controls the light on input from a Hall sensor which senses when the disc clips to the top of the vertical rail. The structures holding the rails and concave disc in place are 3D printed, and in some places covered with white fabric to hide its workings, which consists of rails, a counterweight to increase sliding resistance, and circuit wiring. The disc is attached to a timing belt which slides through two timing belt pulleys, mounted to the top and bottom of the vertical rail. The bottom pulley is connected to a potentiometer to track the disc's position and to enable slight light feedback during movement.

What is "ritualizing"?

There is little consensus about what counts as a ritualizing, partly due to its cultural dependency. In a coming paper, the appropriation of Bell’s ritual framework [1] to interaction design is detailed. In short, a ritual is a way of acting; it is nothing that exists as an independent object. Thus, Bell refers to it in its active form: ritualizing. Engaging with ritualizing is a practical way of dealing with a particular circumstance. However, rituals don’t accomplish a resolution of a concern. Rather, they generate a complete change in the nature and status of a concern. The scheme (hierarchy of privileged distinctions) deployed in the symbolic structure of a ritualizing script, material, movements and general environment is meant to imbue actors with a bodily sense of the ritual; a sense that might be implicit and inaccessible for discourse. Actors of a ritual would see the purpose of a ritual, but not actually see what the ritually ordering, rectifying or transforming of the situation is doing through systematic thinking. Engaging in rituals is to engage with a strategic manipulation of context in the very act of reproducing it. As Bell elaborates, "acts restructure bodies in the very doing of the acts themselves. Required kneeling does not merely communicate subordination to the kneeler. For all intents and purposes, kneeling produces a subordinated kneeler in and through the act itself".

Collateral designs

Bleautop

Mella

Shower head massage

Remotely touch controlled wall-placed artwork

Skills

Design practice: Exploratory domestic design, Somaesthetic design methodologies, Concept designs, Workshop design and execution, Hybrid fiction, Sketching, Thermochromic and Hydrochromic paint
Software: Programming Arduino, Photoshop, Illustrator, Autodesk Fusion 360
Hardware: Arduino, LEDs, Hall sensing, Physical prototyping, Heat actuator
Digital fabrication tools: 3D printing, 3D modelling, Laser cutting, Sowing
Physical construction: Material planning, Material purchasing, Slime making, Encasing, Assembling

Collaborators

Nadia Campo Woytuk (design partner)
Electrolux + KTH (design collaborator and employer)
Nicolas Jonason (light programming)

References

[1] Bell, C. 1992. Ritual theory, ritual practice. Oxford University Press.
[2] Akner-Koler, C., & Ranjbar, P. 2016. Integrating Sensitizing Labs in an Educational Design Process for Haptic Interaction. FORMakademisk, 9(2), 1-25.
[3] Andersen, K. 2013. Making magic machines. In 10th European Academy of Design Conference.
[4] Buur, J., & Friis, P. 2015. Object theatre in design education. In Nordic Design Research ConferenceNordic Design Research Conference.
[5] Djajadiningrat, J. P., Gaver, W. W., & Fres, J. W. 2000. Interaction relabelling and extreme characters: methods for exploring aesthetic interactions. In Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques (pp. 66-71). ACM.
[6] Wilde, D. 2015. Embodying material ideation. In the Proceedings of the Participatory Innovation Conference (pp. 386-397).
[7] Leon Festinger. 1962.A theory of cognitive dissonance.Vol. 2. Stanford university press.
[8] James J Gross. 1998. The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review. Review of general psychology 2, 3 (1998), 271.
[9] Piers Steel. 2007. The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological bulletin 133, 1(2007), 65.