Embedded Files
This project is for my master thesis but a very personal one. Covid-19 hit the world and has left a huge influence for a long time, until the right moment I am writing these lines. Because it influenced daily social activities and human bodily interactions, I have never felt being more isolated, numb, emotionally weak, and homesick.
To have this thesis worked on is true healing for me. I want to say ”thank you” millions of times to Claudia Núñez-Pacheco, my dearest supervisor and friend, who helped me to construct my thesis topic out of non-sense, tailor me into the research process from rawness, and offer me tutorials amidst cold, dark and lonely self-drowning moments.
Also, to my family, my examiners and my friends who supported me during the whole process.
Last but most importantly, I miss you so much, Granny. 我很想念你，外婆。
2021.08 - 2022.01
Introduction
In the third wave of HCI, recognition of bodily and subjective experience is critical to design knowledge.
As a design researcher, engaging in somaesthetics training is necessary to form and reinforce somatic, felt, and personal comprehension. In spite of the somaesthetic commitment and actions on cultivating self-empathy, one of the design challenges is how to help users to evoke, perform, and communicate self-knowledge.
In this thesis, I delved into the area where understanding and articulation become much more problematic, the area of poetry interpretation. I have focused on how to interpret the beauty of a form of ancient Chinese poem called Chu Ci. Enlightened by the artworks and projects in the cultural related field, I have explored somatic clues and somaesthetic experience collected from the participants. Among these, I carried out two design prototypes of Chu Ci to share the somatic interpretation amongst the readers of Chu Ci.
Background
The lived, sentient, purposive body -defined as soma - plays a crucial role in construct- ing everyday experience.
Taking soma as the fundamental tool for people to engage with the world, somaesthetics theory highlights and explores the somatic influences on consciousness, attention, feelings, and emotions.
Researchers:
Richard Shusterman;
Kristina Höök;
More
Focusing is originally a psychotherapy technique created by Eugene Gendlin who argues the body as the door for knowledge-making and meaning-generating.
Focusing has been introduced to the design community by Núñez Pacheco Claudia as an in- trospective method to access detailed subjective information from participants(users).
Researchers:
Richard Shusterman;
Kristina Höök;
More
Chu Ci(楚辞), as an ancient Chinese romantic poetry anthology mainly collecting poems from Warring States Period, shows its charm by using dialect and phonology in the ancient State of Chu area, referencing massive exotic imagina- tions and depicting a form of Chinese Shamanistic respect to nature and spiritual characters. However, these unique characteristics of Chu Ci bring historical-culturally related reading barriers for modern Chinese readers to overcome.
Chu Ci’s anthology includes rich topics of content, from party conflicts in politics to shamanist worship of ghosts of nature and gods. A piece from Chu Ci called Shan Gui(山鬼) is selected for this study because of its potential to activate sensory cognition, including keenness sensation, imaginative capacity, penetrating insight, memory, poetic disposition, foresight, and expressive talent among the readers.
The poem Shan Gui from Nine Songs(九歌) tells a love story of a human and a mountain spirit called Shan Gui. It is controversial whether the mountain spirit in the poem is a female goddess or a male god. There are also controversies about the gender of the protagonist.
Shan Gui portrays the emotional changes of the protagonist step by step from the first time he/she met the mountain spirit to the time they lost contact. In order to call his/her lover back, the protagonist is decked out in wild botanical decorations to attract the mountain spirit. Internal monologue is used through the entire poem to show a feeling of separating from the lover and express a wistful longing for seeing the mountain spirit again. Thousands of twists and turns of thoughts happened while the protagonist lost contact with the mountain spirit. The poet depicts these complex psychological activities of the protagonist together with an extremely desolate mountain forest raining night scene, which brings a sad and touching sense to readers.
a) A picture of ”Shan Gui(the mountain spirit)” from painter Zhang Wo (Chinese, active c.1336 - after 1364) via Cleveland Art Museum. The painter depicted a male Shaman wearing fragrant herbs and animal fur who might be pursuing a female spirit. Or the picture could be the portrait of ”mountain spirit” himself.
b) A picture of ”Mountain spirit” from painter Liu Danzhai (1931-2011), auctioned by Beijing Council International Auction Company in 2014 Spring, personalized a female Shaman pursuing a male spirit, or a female mountain spirit.
The research question
How can we aid the emergence of expressive interpretations of Chu Chi that are not only rational, but also connected to our felt experience?
The design study
The methodology used for this study included Research through Design(RoT) by designing artifacts to generate knowledge and potentially theory; soma design by utilizing lived sentient purposive bodies as a design material and following the soma design manifesto.
The methods structure used for this study composes mainly three parts:
For data collection, Focusing, body maps, and interviews are used to collect the felt senses from the readers, support the readers to articulate and interpret the experience they are connected with when read Chu Ci.
For data analysis, I used thematic analysis to categorize the subjective felt-senses, experience, stories; used the results as resources for design exploration.
For validation and exploration, I used user testing as the tool to collect feedback and comments on the soma-based translations of Chu Ci.
Focusing and interview
To reveal the ideas, emotions, and feelings raised when reading Chu Ci, traditional qualitative interviews are not sufficient. Readers not only have difficulty understanding the poem, but also have difficulty expressing their feelings.
To understand how readers interpreted the poem so that they could give out inspirations on how to design by integrating the body more actively into their meaning-making process, I combined Focusing with a semi- structured interview.
A total of 20 Chinese participants took part in this interview. 1 woman and 1 man withdrew from the study because of a lack of basic knowledge and unwillingness to commit to the poem.
Feedback from 18 participants is affluent, varied, yet complex. To categorize the original transcripts, I used the key words ”keen sensation”, ”poetic disposition”, ”imagination”, ”memories” and ”others” to address the aesthetic aspects Then thematic analysis has been applied to distinguish patterns of these responses, which were condensed into three themes, which include:
Emotional connection with the protagonist;
Augmented self-awareness;
Heightened connection with the imagined environment;
The body maps
The above are 5 examples of body maps drew from Focusing interview.
The following is a portion of the transcribed text regarding sample body maps. The variant expressions present bountiful reading experience (From left to right):
a) ”There was something out of control. Thinking about the woman with the veil, I turned into a plant. I found myself buried in the ground. It was cold all the time because I had the impression of being in a dark corner. The blue wavy line indicates a kind of cold wind blowing. I was unable to control my respiratory rate. My breathing was restricted, and the brown color expressed that my chest was stifled.”
b) ”Yellow represents a kind of internal numbness. I sense like being hit by a kind of electric shock. Only it does not hurt. It makes me shiver till the hand. It is not very strong even though it seems to be spread out. I feel comfortable with it. I am immersed in it when I hear the sound. I have to respond to the sound, to accentuate the sound. If I do not respond, I get back to that numbness. From there, I visualize a clear picture of them looking at each other.”
c) ”Above the head lies the dew in the woods. I know the scent of the woods. My fingers are kind of cool. My feet and legs are submerged in the stream. I am surrounded by a deep and rich green forest, with sunlight exposure.”
d) ”Inside my body map, there are lines. The line is green with some kind of ink painting. The green gives me a primitive, natural, mountain, hermit sensation. In the reading process, the blue colour indicates that I feel sobriety. I know it’s not going to end well. I saw the title and I knew it. My understanding of the poem is a determined story development that I presupposed from the beginning.”
e)”I could not find a comfortable position. I felt tightening in the chest. The picture in my head shows a deep mountain and old forest, surrounded by clouds and mist. The trees are luxurious. There’s water gushing about. A woman appeared. She’s not just any regular woman. She does not belong here.”
The Chinese and English word maps
To quickly grasp the major feedback overview of the frequently used words, I made a Chinese/English word cloud as the visual aid (From top to bottom):
a) In the Chinese word cloud, the most commonly used words are ”感 觉””没 有””看 到””身 体””可 能”.
b) The English version uses the same value as input. Al of the size proposition matches with the Chinese version. However, the locations of the words are reorganized due to the varied length of paired words after translating. The most commonly used words are ”Feel””No””See””Body””Possible”.
The Design prototype
Through Focusing and interviews, I have gained affluent data on how participants feel and experience when reading Shangui. Using thematic analysis, I have found that bodily awareness can connect the feelings from participants with the protagonist’s effectively. Therefore, it can help participants to interpret the poem.
Also, the results show that there are no certain ways to interpret the poem story. In spite of this, participants can articulate themselves in a way that is connected with their bodily senses as well as situate themselves in the environment they have imagined in the poem emotionally. This provided me with expressive ways to connect new audiences with Chu Ci.
The bodily and emotional interpretation on the poem has provided insights for me to build two soma-based prototypes, called ”Gui Shan” and ”Breathing Poems”. To deliver the complex beauty and aesthetic experience of Shan Gui through design, I did not search for quantitative methods to average the personal feelings or to facilitate predefined interpre- tations of the poem. Instead, I looked for strong emotions, strange feelings, and peculiar bodily actions/reactions that are unique enough to inspire design.
Gui Shan
The first prototype ”Gui Shan” is created by noting the influence of environmental effect and its correspondence to aesthetics associated with the theme ”A sense of being there” from thematic analysis.
”Gui Shan, meaning the Mountain where spirits live in” is a paper-made light, which can mimic the shadows in the natural environment. The fragile unstable paper- made leaves could create a sense of being in/next to the woods. Thus it can bring a rich emotional reflection among more people.
Breathing poems
The second prototype is inspired by the Focusing and interview and the accounts of diverse experience from the participants. Through Focusing and interview, I have observed that by evoking bodily awareness, participants can bring outward rich interpretations of the poem. Besides, when carrying Focusing dialogue with participants, there is a particular moment after participants immerse themselves into their whole inner world. To take advantage of the effectiveness of Focusing on holding body sensations, I combined Focusing script into poem script. Finally, ”Breathing Poems” becomes a prototype that includes an Arduino-controlled breathing detector and LED light, natural sound, Focusing script with poem script.
Conclusion
Through this exploratory design research, design knowledge is produced both from the par- ticipant’s somatic engagement and also from the somatic involvement of the designer. The designer is immersed by the prolific interpretations from all the participants, intertwined with various personal understanding and emotional interludes. The soma-based design prototypes are hand-made from the designer’s slow digestion on all the input threads, which is acting as a material witness to the procedure of continuous communication with the poem, not from when it is created, but from the very beginning of the study.
This work produced during this thesis aims to inspire the people who participated in the design process, including my supervisors, myself, my participants, and my friends, of a new form of reading Chu Ci and connecting bodily awareness with the reading experience.
I aim to use this thesis to attract more researchers and designers. I hope they will start to notice and be interested in ancient Chinese poems. From there, I hope they will find pieces that they love and would like to introduce to their friends, family, and probably academia. Potentially they will start to work on finding, creating, and developing more forms, engage- ments, interactions of how to interpret ancient poems in contemporary contexts. Hopefully, the methodology used in this work would play as an example, a handle to reference for them. After all, the ancient cultural heritage could not speak for themselves. By using new technologies, I want to make sure their voices do not fade in the flow of information. It is our duty to unveil the hidden beauty, to pass the legacy to new generations.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse