The “support of bodily expression of experience between people” presents a significant research challenge in the design of systems for sharing experiences; this is the focus of this paper. Sensory experiences such as touch coupled with bodily movements are integral to how people interpret the world around them to make sense of their immediate environment, and are critical to emerging areas of research, such as mediated digital interactions. In this work, the authors present their explorative results of studying bodily interactions through a probe system called Lega, which “provides a mechanism for situated, bodily expressive sharing of experience.”
The paper captures the use of Lega at the Liljevalchs art hall in Stockholm, Sweden. “In addition to the pure bodily experience, [Lega provides] context (location) and knowledge about who created an expression,” allowing opportunities to attach meaning to sensations; users can then more fully understand why the expression was left and its subtle meanings. Results from the experiments demonstrate that there is a subtle conflict that exists “between being able to continually engage in one’s individual meaning making with a system while at the same time being able to stay open to and simultaneously engage in a socially shared experience” (distributed to groups of individuals).
The authors note that the system has been explicitly designed to “not allow users to leave a trace at the same time they picked up a trace,” which steers them toward sharing a social experience (versus an individual one). The asynchrony arising from the instant the experience happens to the instant when the experience is recorded seems to have left some users a bit disoriented at not being able to adequately self-reflect.
In summary, although preliminary, this is interesting research work that adds valuable insight to the emerging topic of how people may interact in digitally mediated situations, with a specific focus on how a person is able to balance self-reflection with social engagement within a participating group.
