Somatosensory activation supports focus during creative making process
Somatosensory Activation and Attentional States in Creative Making
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Capturing how people create things can be hard because it’s tricky to remember and explain what happens during the process. The authors combine methods from dance, sensory study, and design to better record these creative moments, including using wearable devices to enhance body senses. This helps people pay closer attention to their creative choices by increasing their awareness through their senses and movement. Their approach mixes personal experience, notes, and interviews to understand how people focus when creating.
What this means in practice
- •For wearable device designers: Develop wearable tools that enhance users’ body awareness to support deeper focus during creative activities.$Commercial implications: Wearable technology companies could create products that improve creative focus by activating somatosensory systems, based on this research’s approach.
- •For art workshop facilitators: Use mixed methods from dance and sensory ethnography to better document and guide creative workshops with embodied and reflective practices.
Authors
Katherine Rees
Abstract
The methods for capturing the creative process come with associated tensions around memory recall, articulation, and communication during the act of making, as well as how to record these considerations. This paper has a twofold purpose: first, to offer an example of a mixed methodology, drawn from dance anthropology, sensory ethnography, and design, that applies embodied methods as an alternative for documenting creative making. Specifically, this incorporates the researcher-as-participant and the collation of fieldnotes, embodied knowledge/movement recall, with notation forms, and participant interviews. These are existing methods in dance anthropology; however, using them alongside exploratory prototyping and workshop approaches broadened this work into transdisciplinary practice. Second, it discusses the activation of somatosensory systems through wearable technology and the facilitation of heightened sensory awareness for the practitioner, leading to a subsequent ability to focus on creative decisions linked to reflection and metacognition.