Getting into someone else's soul: communicating embodied experience

ABSTRACT The idea of connecting with the sensory realities of others can help us to build empathic ties and to think outside the boundaries of our preconceived ideas. Envisioning these opportunities, this paper introduces a framework with a set of embodied modalities derived from communicating embodied experiences through a prototype for storytelling called SOUL. This prototype was built to transmit some experiential qualities based on a first-person narrative truthfully. Three ways of bodily connecting with the experience of others are here identified as (1) assertion, (2) negotiation or (3) dissension, and described as different ways of generating embodied connections with the prototype. This approach is intended to enrich the value of alterity in HCI, including disagreement and tension in times where the design of one size fits all artefacts appear as the general rule. We conclude that this sensory way of transmitting meaning can be useful for communicating assertive messages.