Knotation

Abstract

Contemporary choreographers often interact directly with dancers when exploring their ideas, but lack adequate tools for capturing and documenting their work. Although our first study of choreographers and dancers revealed diverse strategies for recording choreographic fragments, we found that they all worked in terms of constraints, which they represented via spatial diagrams, as movement qualities or with their own personal notation system. This led to the design of Knotation, a mobile pen-based tool that lets choreographers sketch their own representations of choreographic ideas and render them interactive. In study two, Knotation served as a technology probe to support the contrasting practices of three professional choreographers. We revised Knotation based on their input, and ran a third structured observation study with six professional choreographers. Knotation easily supported both dance-then-record and record-then-dance strategies. Participants used and appropriated Knotation's advanced features, including the combination of interactive timelines and floorplan diagrams, to represent and explore complex choreographic structures.

Understanding Kinaesthetic Creativity in Dance

“…Multiple design approaches have emerged in HCI to support dance-making, favoring improvisation [33], annotation [4], documentation [7], or visualization [19,37]. Alternatively, theories in modern dance [38] and studies with expert dancers and choreographers have opened new ways to formalize the body in HCI and to explore new paradigms for interaction [11,12].…”

“…Following: systems for movement learning: "Following" interactions can be found in systems designed to be partners in supporting the user reach a goal, such as XBox's Just Dance 7 . The user copies the virtual partner's movements and get feedback on how well they are executing those movements.…”

Studying Choreographic Collaboration in the Wild

“…According to Dalsgaard [20] "few digital tools [for creative work] are developed with collaboration in mind". And, although a variety of CSTs were designed for dance making, only a few address collaboration from the beginning of the creative process [16,19]. Long-term deployments of technology specially designed for dance making in ecologically valid studies could illuminate different ways in which collaboration unfolds among dance artists.…”

“…This paper focuses on a 5-month field study with a choreographer and six pre-professional dance students who used Knotation [19], a CST for choreographic writing, in the frame of a course on dance and technology in a conservatory in Paris, France. We had designed Knotation for and with choreographers [18,19] but the prototype had not been deployed as a fully-fledged tool in real-world settings without artificial tasks and within an ecosystem of other analog and digital tools. Before presenting our analysis, we disclose our initial assumptions as researchers studying collaboration in dance making.…”

Treasure Hunting: an exploratory study of how designers and scientists identify potential collaborative projects

“…The second study focuses on analysing how scientists interpret and engage with designers' ideas. Given the current lack of understanding about the treasure hunting process, our goal is not to test hypotheses, but rather to create comparable conditions -structured observationfor identifying common patterns and differences that emerge, despite the highly individual nature of the activity (Garcia, Tsandilas, Agon, & Mackay, 2014;Ciolfi Felice, Fdili Alaoui, & Mackay, 2018).…”