Sketching movement: designing creativity tools for in-situ, whole-body authorship

Abstract

Tools for interaction with movement data are proliferating on the consumer market, demonstrating the increased valuation of whole-body movement in product and interaction design. However, few of these tools support creative authoring on user-friendly platforms. We present a system titled 'iDanceForms' (iDF) as a mobile sketching tool for designing creative movement in-situ. Sketching is a unique and often under-valued process in creative design, enabling the user to quickly prototype and evaluate ideas. iDF is designed around the affordances of mobile tablets, and is based on an animation platform to easily segment movement data as keyframes. The design around keyframe segmentation enables multiple user-friendly editing options as well as camera capture functions to bridge embodied exploration with digital editing. iDF is a creativity support tool that engages with choreographers' creative movement process by design: it was developed based on the epistemology of choreographic process. This paper presents the design of iDF and evaluations from two studies that explore professional and novice choreographer's creative experience with the application.