Brief: Design a sensory based ritual or experience for the characters of the Xenosomatics world/culture we build together.
Teammates: Damul Yang, Eric Dodd, Sue An
A new term began with more obscure articles and stricter lockdown, which was somehow frustrating. But as John said, we have moved into the second level and need to take a step deeper:)
What is Somatics
The Collaborative Unit week 1 was worked with Susan Ploetz, she brought us a new term—the human soma. Soma is a unity of sensory-motor functions, which including either volitional or involuntary. Hanna(2016) Intruded that Somatics studies how human perceive from the first-person viewpoint of proprioceptive senses. As I understand so far, the difference between “soma” and “body” is that “soma” emphasizes human's internal proprioception, it's what you experience that makes the feelings real.
What is Larping art
Stenros and Montola (2010) introduce that Nordic Larp is a kind of immersive storytelling emphasis on collaboration and collective creation. In Interaction Design and Human-Computer Interaction, larps were used as a target design space, producing research insights that could inspire technology design for co-located social experiences (Márquez Segura, 2019). I assumed these were the reason we were supposed to learn this lesson, since Larping experience is a co-design process and has potential to inspire design ideas.
Skinship Workshop
In the mini-larp sessions of Xenosomatics, Susan invited us to experience the skinship workshop remotely. We were asked to image ourselves from alien perspectives to re-learn daily objects (rock, leaf, cup of water and a pillow) through meditation and sensory exploration.
Workshop with Susan. Screenshot by Kate.
After that, we were encouraged to share our first thoughts of each object, speak out the words then repeat them. I noticed that we experienced the same objects very differently, with a pillow some classmates felt soft while others felt rough, this is due to we perceive the world from our first-person viewpoints, the individuals have significant differences.
Reflection
I love the idea of sense togetherness, the workshop was meant to explore how senses affect movement, perception, cognition. During the process, I started to become aware of the interplay between imagination and physical materials. But it's still a challenge in an online environment, I found it’s difficult to emulate into a non-human character since I was still in a human atmosphere.
I was also wondering how ‘open' the design of Larp is. From Susan's introduction, Larping is an improvised activity with no limitation, as larp designers, how much freedom we should offer players and how many restrictions we should set for them. With this in mind, our group started our ritual project.
References
Hanna, T. What is Somatics? (2016). Available at: https://somatics.org/library/htl-wis1. (Accessed: 22 January, 2021).
Márquez Segura, E., Spiel, K., Johansson, K., Back, J., Toups, Z.O., Hammer, J., Waern, A., Tanenbaum, T.J. and Isbister, K., 2019, June. Larping (Live Action Role Playing) as an Embodied Design Research Method. In Companion Publication of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2019 Companion (pp. 389-392).