Team: Eda Erdal/ Qendresa Selimi/ Vanessa Van/ Zhaolu Song
Brief: Design a sensory-based ritual or experience for the characters of the Xenosomatics world/culture we build together.
Time: 25.01.2021-29.01.2021
Returning from Christmas break with a new lockdown in London, unfortunately, we started this term remotely. This week, We will collaborate with Susan Ploetz, an artist and researcher focusing on somatics, as our guest lecturer to discuss somatics and design an experience.
Soma and Somatics
Somatics is the study of the soma, which is about perceiving the self internally. The difference between “soma” and “body” is that “soma” emphasizes proprioception from the first-person view instead of a third-person view and gathers unique and unified data that is not needed to be analyzed. (Hanna, 2016)
Body map by Susan.
Somatic experience
Susan introduced her workshop Skinship: touching intelligence (online version). During the process, we were first asked to close our eyes and then imaged being aliens and think about the changes in our bodies. By feeling things, like leaf, stone, tissue, through the sense of touch and taste, anyone can say their feelings of the object in any language. At the same time, others need to repeat the words.
Though it’s difficult for me to think of myself as the alien character immediately, immersing myself in the character did help me generate some inspirations, like what the alien's sensations could be, what’s the feeling of having more limbs.
Xeno Larping
Larping means live action role playing, in which participants physically act out scenarios, typically using costumes and props.
“larping is a collaborative, pretending with rules.” - Larping.org (2014)
Susan led us to her larping in Xenosomatics, which is a world set a speculative scenario where alien and human life forms are inextricably linked and where the distinction between the two is rapidly disappearing. I had a Xeno Larping with Ines and Giada. Each one of us acted in a role with different personal abilities and tasks in the Xenosomatics world and tried to understand each other through touching. Through larping, what I found interesting is that everyone in larping can influence the development direction of the story and the story would also be different with different participants.
Larping process. GIf by Ines.
Larping process. Video by Ines.
Co-design and co-creation in Larping
Larping is a new experience for me and I found it’s quite interesting and enjoyable. I felt very relaxed during the whole experience. The interesting I found was the co-design and co-creative processes are involved in larping, which leaves me a lot of space to imagine and to be a creator of it as well.
Involving the first-person perception would be very useful in design to uncover new ideas. Thomas Hanna, a philosopher and somatic educator pointed that focusing on third-person observation which observes the human body as objective entities will lead to fundamental misunderstandings in physiology, psychology, and medicine. So does that in the design process, I think the first-person regulation can’t be seen by third-person observation, which could also result in something missing. Designers shouldn’t only design for others from the third-person’s view, but also need to involve others designing for themselves.
Next blog, I’ll talk about our design process of the sensory-based online experience.
References
Hanna, T. (2016). What is Somatics? Available at: https://somatics.org/library/htl-wis1.(Accessed: 24 January 2021).
Larping.org (2014). Larp Definition. Available at: https://larping.org/larp-definition/ (Accessed: 25 January 2021).
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