Materialising Movement – Designing for movement-based digital interaction

Designers today have access to full-body movement data to explore the rich, interpersonal, non-verbal communication we read, interpret, enact, and perform every day. In this paper, we describe an approach to movement as a design material, where movement is seen as embodied communication. We discuss the mix of qualities in data derived from full-body movement as it encompasses the corporeal and computational, and how to present such data. The aim for this exploration is to tease out the rich communicative potential of full-body movement for digital interactions by enabling an explorative engagement with movement data. People increasingly move with, for and through technology. We argue that designers need to be aware of the nature of movement data and how such data may be applied, addressed, and influenced. Because we are concerned with the meaning-making design process of movement-based interactions, the main analytical approach taken in this study is communication and social semiotics. We suggest that for interaction design, movement may be parsed by Velocity, Position, Repetition and Frequency. We further describe the development of a tool, Sync, for generating dynamic movement data visualizations, and reflect on abstracting and visualizing movement data in order to inform and enable design processes of movement-based digital interactions.