Doctoral Thesis Defence: Lise Amy Hansen
PhD Candidate Lise Amy Hansen is set to defend her thesis, entitled Communicating Movement. Full-body movement as a design material for digital interaction on 11th June at AHO. Trial lecture: Movement as material in interaction design practice – tools and examples.
About the thesis
Today our surroundings are increasingly perforated by digital systems that inform and influence, shift and shape our movements. The aim of this thesis has been to explore and present a creative potential in conceptualising full-body movement and movement data for digital interaction, motivated by the expressive and performed movements that we observe and act upon in interpersonal communication every day. I have developed theoretical concepts and intermediary digital tools as a means to explore full-body movement as a design material, that is, as a communicative resource for meaning-making in the design of digital interactions.
The focus is on communication and how corporeal qualities are in part expressed through our movement dynamics. Movement requires a body and this body is aged, gendered, cultured and conditioned as well as sensate, expressive and performed. I adopt a Social Semiotics framework to explore how to address such notions through their visual form and I draw on design investigations in collaborative, explorative workshops to develop Sync, a tool for visualising movement dynamics.
Through research on choreography and digital tools I have positioned movement in relation to design and argue that there are creative and pivotal decisions in how we materialise movement and movement data for design. Corporeal qualities may be made creatively available through materialising acts, such as through digital tools for the dynamic visualisations of movement data. By unfolding the concerns of the various stages of materialising movement, designers can consider the role of movement at a conceptual level, and in turn, enable interactions to be built that are informed by a critical view on movement and, by extension, the role of our bodies.
About the candidate
Lise Amy Hansen (1971) holds an MA in Communication Art & Design from the Royal College of Art, London and a BA (Hons) from Central Saint Martins (CSM). She has been a lecturer at CSM, KHiO and AHO, and run the design agency Witt Hansen Ltd, working with arts and culture as well as urban regeneration in London and Oslo. She has also arranged and participated in international workshops and artlabs on the intersections of communication, computation and choreography.
Adjucation committeee
– Jay D. Bolter, Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
– Lars Hallnäs, Professor, University of Borås, Sweden.
– Alma Leora Culén, Ass. Professor, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway.
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