Team

Dr. Alissa N. Antle (PI, research and design lead)

Graduate students:
Greg Corness
Milena Droumeva
Allen Bevans
Sijie Wang

Learn more here

Project Summary

Springboard is whole body interactive environment where users move their bodies in and out of balance to explore images and sounds that represent balance and imbalance in social justice (issues related to shelter, food, community safety). Results from experiments with whole body or handheld devices as input indicated that when users move their bodies in and out of balance they more deeply experience issues in social justice related to balance. This prototype extended work on embodied metaphor based design begun with SoundMaker into a full multimedia environment representing abstract concepts (balance in justice) vs percepts (sounds).

Research Objectives

Investigate the impact of using embodied metaphor theory to structure whole body interaction in an abstract domain — three social justice issues: food production, shelter and security.

Social Impact Goals

Demonstrated that we can enhance users’ awareness and understanding of social justice issues through body-based (embodied) interaction with digital content (images, sounds).

Keywords

Embodied metaphor theory, image schemas, embodied interaction design, social justice, embodiment.

Technology

Camera vision, MaxMSP, Jitter in  Black Box with 20 foot screen and Dolby surround sound.

Funders

NSERC RTI, NSERC Discovery and SFU Small SSHRC.