My self and you: Tension in bodily sharing of experience

Abstract

There is a growing interest in designing systems for sharing experience through bodily interaction. To explore this design space, we built a probe system we named the Lega. In our 2-month-long research design process, we noted that the users' attention was set on their own reflective experience, rather than attending to the person(s) with which they were sharing their experience. To explain these findings, we present an inductive analysis of the data through a phenomenological lens to pinpoint what causes such behavior. Our analysis extends our understanding of how to design for social embodied interaction, pointing to how we need to embrace the tension between self-reflection and shared experience, making inward listening and social expression visible acts, accessible to social construction and understanding. It entails experiencing our embodied self as others experience us in order to build a dialogue. © 2014 ACM.