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Preview of Thursday's Activities
Events of the Day
Embodying Information. Creating somatic experiences of data through dance
The Embodying Information workshop offered participants (1) an overview of the possibilities for engagement between dance and design, (2) practice-based experience with embodied modes of representing data, (3) an introduction to concepts and structures in dance that provide new opportunities in data physicalization.
The workshop includes a warm-up followed by a series of data movement activities and opportunities for reflection and collective meaning-making. Warm-up activities serve to activate bodies and may include body scans and guided imagery techniques. During data movement activities, participants experiment with elements of movement and the ways in which they can be mapped to traditional data representations. The workshop includes individual and group reflections with prompts aimed at probing connections with participants’ disciplines as well as a critical engagement with both the movement and data.
Laura Perovich
Assistant Professor, Art + Design
Ilya Vidrin
Postdoctoral Associate, Theatre
Nicole Zizzi
Design Research & Communications, Center for Design
Key Takeaways
This project is situated within a larger project titled Embodying Information: the Physicalization of Data through Performance, exploring both “data dancing” and “data theatre.”
Data dancing—investigating a formal approach, translating data vizualization and their attributes to abstract movement
Data theater—investigating a narrative approach, acting out data and the stories behind it.
This research draws on adjacent fields such as soma design, data physicalization, dance, interaction design, embodied cognition, human-computer interaction, and more.
Warm-up #1—3 degrees of freedom of movement while seated
Rotation
Pitch body
Side Bend
Warm-up Activity #2—creating shapes with the body
Shape tracing and shape making are movement techniques that can be used to embody an object.
Participants explored this with a found object—this started with tracing the object’s 3 dimensions through touch. Participants then stepped away from the object and began to trace the object in the air (finger painting) and slowly increased its scale so that participants could “step into” their object. They then created the shape of the object with their bodies from inside the object itself, filling up the space of the object with different configurations of body parts.
Data Activity #1—representing information through your body through tracing.
Similar to warm-up activity #2, participants started by tracing a line graph on their screens, then moving away from the screen increasing the size of the line tracing, eventually leading to a gesture of the line graph. This gesture is an embodiment of the line.
Data Activity #2—representing information through your body through scale, space, and shape.
Scale—participants explored representation of a bar graph by changing the height of their bodies relative to each bar.
Space—participants mapped the bar graph on the floor in front of them and walked forwards and backward to represent the height of each bar.
Shape—participants explored representing each bar by altering the shapes of their bodies.
For more information on this project email Nicole Zizzi at n.zizzi@northeastern.edu
Design Research Tools and Methods. Categorization as meaning-making
In recent years, there has been an explosion of publicly available design tools that are becoming more popular among both designers and non-designers. This has enhanced other practices and disciplines by making conceptual design thinking– a designerly way of knowing– more accessible to all. Without a common or widely accepted categorization of what constitutes a design method, as opposed to a design tool, though, the discourse lacks a systematic approach for organizing and differentiating these resources. Is the lack of a categorization methodology hindering our ability to effectively use and perform more rigorous and reflective design research?
Estefania Ciliotta
Post-Doctoral Strategist & Researcher, Center for Design
Paolo Ciuccarelli
Founding Director, Center for Design; Professor of Design
Nathan Felde
Professor of Design
Ezio Manzini
Founder, DESIS Network; Professor Emeritus, Politecnico di Milano
Nicole Zizzi
Design Research & Communications, Center for Design
Conversation with the Audience: Questions and Provocations
Concept of play and its importance in reflection
Why use a methodology? Tinkerin/playing to challenge knowledge basis?
Design is political
Maybe the categories are not fixed, they can be rearranged, flexible
We can apply the same methods for different goals
You can only be certain of what you can comprehend
Switching back and forth between methods - biases
How can we have a dynamic + construct the categories that we have in the archive?
We as designers are the facilitators, the connectors, we are not the most experts in the room but we can make connections and facilitate the research process.
There is a power of not knowing
Learning by doing | by designing - methods of design?
A key question should be: how do you document?
Fundamental to discuss search vs research: design activity is a SEARCH. Then, why do we need RESEARCH?
Complexity as a value and embracing complexity. You have to be part of a collective activity forming research - codesign, co-process. The result of my activity has to be a package for others to use and continue from there, to increase and create new knowledge with a base - of collective intelligence
We should recognize complexity as a value and embrace it in our designerly search
A strategic approach that allows you to face complexity and cut a subsystem where you have the local possibility and power to intervene and make the change happen
What are the system and the subsystem in which you are working?
To frame the element that we as designers have the power to intervene
We as designers have to have threads and progressively give answers to these questions
Local possibility to intervene and make the change happen, but you need to define the system and subsystem in which you are working
Framing! Framing the element we have the power to intervene
The community of design should have threads for questions that are continually developed
The designerly act to “cut”
We increase possibilities with a cut
The designerly act is to cut, to decide is to fold (deterministic)
Cutting open, increase possibilities with a cut
Cutting away the domain that is not relevant
The T model: In design research both vertical and horizontal
Design defines the why
Documentation is the problem in design
The power of scale and you will ask completely different questions depending on the scale that you are impacting
Mapping research might allow for more flexibility rather than categories
Iterative process and defining the context again and again’
Multidisciplinary collaboration is key
Our way of doing should not be the same as the scientific way. Design is not a science because our methods can be very diverse. We have to know what we want to do and then we discuss the methodology
We are weak because we have not been capable to demonstrate our way of doing: cutting the system, using creativity in a certain way…
Making something visible and tangible is the act of the design
The role of language plays an important role in design research
Nathan Felde’s POV on Design Research
Watching myself doing what I am doing while I am doing it? - second-order cybernetics is fundamental
Do I understand what I am doing while I am doing it?
He emphasized that there are methods that you can adapt and use in different situations: context-based methods
He also emphasized the role of play in design in design research – “not knowing what I am doing”, he argued, “I am only designing when I don't know what I am doing…”
He explained the concept of reconnaissance - entering a design exploratory space with the unknown
You try to do something, you see the results, compare them, iterate
Iteration is in the context of the life of the project
He made an interesting distinction between Search vs. Re-search – in the latter you need to keep documentation so you can repeat your search and avoid your mistakes
Ezio Manzini’s POV on Design Research
Defining the research question is fundamental
How do you describe the new communities if you are not involved in the definition and formation of that community?
In a world that is changing so fast, finding new paths and developing and reflecting on new projects is part of the learning process in which we can be
The method is learning by doing and designing
Hearing sounds, collecting data. How to map the world through the act of listening
The workshop blended a hands-on activities with reflections on the insights we can gather from acoustic data as autographs of complex phenomena. The workshop was divided into two parts. The first part (approx. 40 min) is dedicated to an outdoor soundwalk activity with the goal of increasing awareness of the sonic environment and the information that we receive through listening. Listening methods and tips to decode this information was shared with the participants as they walked the NU campus. During the second part (approx. 30 min), participants used sonic data to create visual soundmaps of the spaces they visited using different visualization techniques.
Sara Lenzi
Postdoctoral Research Scientist
Key takeaways
Last year CfD launched the Data Sonification Archive, a web repository of projects that use sound to represent, analyse and communicate data in a great variety of fields, with different purposes and for different users. These projects leverage our relationship with sound in Everyday life. In fact, through sound we learn, from the very start of our lives, to navigate the world around us, and to interact with it and with all the living creatures in it.
How to listen to and decode the soundscape around it has been the object of inspiring studies from the 1960s. Murray Schafer, who coined the very term soundscape, showed us how to listen to, collect and categories the world’s soundscape, and ultimately how to use this information to monitor and understand the changes in our collective life.
During the DRW, we run a workshop that interprets soundscape studies in the tradition inaugurated by Schafer as a 101 exercise to learn how to use sound to represent data. In fact, I believe that listen is an extremely active attitude though which we are, in fact, collecting data. How we use this data to interpret the world is part of what we can call an autogrphic approach to sonification.
During the workshop, we explored the sonic environment of the Northeastern Campus and we pushed ourselves to decode the information associated to it in a different perspective, through a classical sound walk, an outdoor activity in which participants are guided to an active listening exercise. Back at CfD, we analysed several sound maps i.e. pictorials that we use to represent what we heard during the soundwalk.
Soundmaps can use icons, color coding, onomatopoeias and other visual elements to represent sound in space. A very stimulating conversation ensued about how this visual representation connects to the soundscape and how this could be integrated into multi sensory data representations moving forward.
For more information on this project email Sara Lenzi at s.lenzi@northeastern.edu
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