Sketching through the body

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore techniques to design specific gestures with children to improve the interaction design of a FullBody Interaction Learning Environment. This exploratory case study is part of the EcoSystem Project, a learning environment aimed at supporting children's understanding of environmental issues related to air-pollution. In order to involve children in the design of the physical interaction with the system, we used two different techniques to facilitate the design of gestures: "sketching through the body" and "sketching with puppets". The results indicate that children adopted different strategies to design gestures for each technique. Within them, the most effective approach was related to the switch between performing gestures with their own bodies and simulating those gestures with puppets. This finding indicates the potential of those Participatory Design methods which combine multi-modal resources as instruments to allow children to reflect upon their own knowledge and express it more precisely.

Multimodal methodological approach for participatory design of Full-Body Interaction Learning Environments

“…To address these risks, a growing number of studies have proposed initial efforts to employ PD techniques (Muller, 2003) to involve end-users in the design of FUBILEs (Enyedy et al, 2012; Grønbæk et al, 2007; Höysniemi et al, 2005; Landry et al, 2012; Schaper et al, 2014, 2015). Some studies (Enyedy et al, 2012; Malinverni et al, 2016a) have employed PD techniques developed for traditional WIMP interfaces (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) to co-define content-related aspects.…”

Making Sense of Body and Space through Full-Body Interaction Design

“…In the third session, we asked children to make flexible puppets [13] with different materials (Figure 2) such as straws, wooden sticks, wire, fabric in different colors, tape, glue, etc. After that, we showed them a map of the culture center.…”

“…As a consequence, in the last decade a wide range of interactive technologies have been introduced to exhibition spaces to create new avenues of learning [1]. Building on this, the child-computer interaction community has explored the potential of Full-Body Interaction Learning Environments (FUBILEs) to foster students' skills towards collaboration [8], perspectivetaking [11] and the understanding of abstract concepts [13], among others. Many of these studies arise from the embodied cognition framework and propose the use of physicality and spatiality to promote learning.…”

“…In other words, these studies do not consider how users' perception of their body and spatial aspects of the environment could impact how and what they learn. On the other hand, despite the long-standing tradition of participatory practices for interaction design [10], only a few studies involve children in the design process of FUBILEs [13]. One reason for this may be the difficulty in designing and developing prototypes at a fullbody scale.…”

“…Despite this bodilybased training, our results indicated that children tended to describe interaction design ideas related to devicebased gestures (such as point, click, drag and drop) as opposed to using full-body movements. To overcome this shortcoming, we decided to incorporate the bodystorming technique in follow-up PD workshops [13]. The goal this time was to enable children to design specific body actions of a FUBILE aimed at supporting children's understanding around environmental issues of airpollution.…”