Wearable Choreographer: Designing Soft Robotics for Dance Practice

Wearable Choreographer: Designing Soft Robotics for Dance Practice
Catarina Allen d'Ávila Silveira, Ozgun Kilic Afsar, Sarah Fdili Alaoui

DIS'22: ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS)
Session: Video Previews

Abstract
In this pictorial, we describe an auto-biographical design process that led to the fabrication of a soft robotics wearable for lower limb movement guidance that we called Wearable Choreographer. We first explored the design from a first-person perspective and then shared it with four dancers. Our experiments illustrate how the wearable both constrains and inspires the dancers into new ways of performing, challenging them to rethink their movements.
Our design inquiry contributes with reflections on soft robotics that uncover the challenges and prospects designers and researchers in Human-Computer Interaction face when designing, prototyping and experimenting with such technologies for embodied interactions.

30-second video previews of DIS 2022