Due to sickness, we have been forced to work over zoom, which isn’t the best when working with bodily movements, but we have tried our best. We decided that the first kind of movement that we wanted to explore was the use of gross movements since much of the interactions used today are small hand movements with a focus on fine motor skills, and we to try different kinds of movements and with different body parts. We decided that, to begin with exploring arm movement. We tested out how speed, direction and how activating different joints affect the feeling of the movement.
We found that speed is strongly connected to the feeling of effort and control. A quicker movement gave a movement the feeling of needing less effort, but at the same time, we lost the feeling of being in control over the movement. When experimenting with speed and direction, I experienced that rapid movements only allowed one direction. If I want to work with movements that allow a change in direction during the moment, the speed needs to be decreased, and the movement needs to be stepwise or more flowing. Also, how the direction of the movement can be changed is connected to the speed of the movement. If I wanted to change the directions of the movement, the speed needed to be at such a pace that I felt that I had control over it. Otherwise, it felt like the movement transferred through the body, and it didn’t have a nice feel to it. It felt forced and unnatural. Another observation is that how large range a movement has, and how static it is, affects the feeling of exhaustion more than I thought. The closer your arms are to your body, the better endurance you will have.
Experimenting with different kinds of arm movements was helpful because we wanted to hold on to the feeling of control and to be able to control with movements. The arms also feel like a good decision since we can use three different points to collect data; shoulder, elbow and wrist. It feels like the wrist can be a useful body part to extract data from in relation to the other two.
Working with control and keeping the advice from the last coaching session, we will start with creating a sketch where you can control the volume with the help of arm movements.