 Thank you. Thank you, Rowan. Good afternoon. Good morning. Sorry. Good afternoon. Good morning, everybody. It's really lovely to be here and I'd like to thank Martin and Petra, especially for inviting me to be the keynote to this Moodle Moodle conference. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. Just to give you a little bit of background about myself, so I have to confess that I'm not a Moodle user, as I think most of you are, so I'm on the back foot there, but that I blame my institution. I'm from the University of Sydney and we use blackboard. But I just heard that actually blackboard's been infiltrated by Moodle people, so maybe blackboard's gonna get a whole lot better. I certainly hope so. So I have a little bit of a, I wouldn't call it even love hate, but I'm not very fond of blackboard. So in terms of learning platforms that can actually transform education for students and actually for the teachers as well, I haven't actually had really good experiences, but I'm hoping that you as Moodle users have and can maybe share some of that with me as well. So I won't be talking about Moodle in my keynote, but I'm hoping to offer you some other kind of perspectives on how to design for human and aesthetic experience that are informed by my mixed practice. And so in terms of my background, I'm an educator. I'm as I work at the University of Sydney. I've been in academia for about 15 years. I used to work at the University of Technology in the engineering and IT faculty. So I do have a technical background. That was my first degree. And then I got very much more drawn towards the humanities, the arts and performance and those kinds of disciplines that actually work directly with subjectivity and with human experience. So in my research and also in my teaching, I'm trying to blend those kinds of approaches. If any of you are from, who's from a technical or engineering faculty, anyone here? So you probably know, well, I'm assuming that the kinds of subjects you teach there are much more around the technical rational model. You may be dealing with social aspects, but maybe less. Often the subjective is seen as something to be distrusted. And I know when I was all the courses I taught when I was teaching software engineering and things like that didn't, you know, there wasn't a whiff really of human experience in there. If anyone used the I word, you were seen as very suspicious and it was sort of shut down. So there's a lot of abstracting away of the lived experience of what actually you experience in daily life, how you feel, what that kind of trajectory is. And so I'm very interested in how to bring that back into the design of technologies that actually are impacting most of our daily lives as well. I'm also a dancer and performance artist. So I have a still train in a Japanese form of buto. And you'll see how that also is influencing the kind of work I do. So the kinds of projects I do across art design and human computer interaction. And I publish towards all of those fields. So I'm very highly interdisciplinary. I'm also interested in how we can use our bodies for learning. And so that will be part of what I'm talking about today. I just like to start the talk, though, by framing what I do within this idea of the attention economy. And maybe this is some of the things we've been talking about already at this conference. And this idea that, you know, we are our computers, our mobile phones and other kinds of devices are continually vying for our attention. That at the one time, they're an amazing technology that allows to do all kinds of things in all kinds of places. And offering all new opportunities for learning. But they also have a dark side, what I like to call the shadow side, in that there are all these sort of unexpected effects that happen that are probably not so good for our general well-being. And so there's been a lot of work, studies around more around in the psychological realms, looking at how we're really living more in a distraction economy than an attention economy and how we need to actually manage that. So as designers and educators, we need to think carefully about how we design those, the use of these kinds of devices and things that, you know, we're blending into sort of an ecology of learning and whether it's actually having the kind of effect that we actually want or is it actually leading to more stress and anxiety. I'm just going to start by playing this video that's called attention as a scarce resource. It's by the artist, Michaela Davies, who's also a psychologist, and she investigates questions of agency. And so this particular piece was exhibited at the Tinsheds Gallery at the University of Sydney in 2013. And you'll see, it's sort of an extreme version of how our lives actually choreographed by technology. OK, so that particular piece, so it wasn't your mobile phones prompting you to do various things, but electric muscle stimulation technology. So I don't know if anyone's ever tried it, but you put these pads on your bodies and they're programmed to make your muscles twitch using tiny electrical signals. Has anyone had to go at this kind of stuff? Maybe when you've been to a physio or something like that for some, that kind of treatment. So it, I had to go at this and it felt horrible. It was like this horrible electric thing going down my arm, but maybe that's because I'm so skinny. I think you have to feel a little bit of flesh and it feels a bit better. But I'm quite amazed about how her performance actually kept a straight face all the way through, as if nothing was happening. I couldn't have actually endured that. But it's a very vivid, very visceral example of maybe where we could be going in the future. But this is a critical artistic sort of take on these sort of ideas and what kind of agency we have in these situations. Our everyday normal lives are we're just having dinner with our friends. Also to make the point that our younger generation are really being born into this destruction economy. I don't know if any of you have children or you teach children or young adults. And this is this pretty typical even you walk around the streets, everyone's on their mobile devices and the world is really being mediated through those the whole time. I was sort of impressed and slightly horrified when my teenage daughter a couple of years ago said to me, oh, mom, you know, she was boasting. Look, I'm so great at multitasking. She had like her, you know, she was doing homework supposedly on her laptop. She was Skyping with a friend. She was playing some sort of game. She was watching two movies simultaneously. That was multitasking. So that was, you know, they're really, really good at multitasking this generation. But I have to ask the question, how good are they actually paying attention, paying attention to a single task and of actually being present in the moment? So I think we're having these sort of conflicting demands on our attention and our capacity to pay attention in different kinds of ways and to be present, be more present to our data lives and what we're doing that these kinds of technologies that are sort of prodding and nudging and all that kind of stuff like how, you know, what are they really doing to our ability to pay attention? One of my colleagues, Caitlin Dabrini, who I'm collaborating with is also looking at mindfulness in design. And looking at various studies that have been noticing, noting the sort of deleterious effects of this kind of practice that is going on. And so we're also interested in how can you manage the rhythms of interaction and the sort of constant pinging notification. I mean, we can turn them off, but I just installed a couple new apps on my phone the other day and they were defaulted to notifications. So all of a sudden there's weird pingings and stuff and noises that are coming through. And some of them are quite pleasant, but I was like, what's that? And so you continue like, what's that? What's that? What's that? So we have to be very careful about how we actually can design the rhythms of interaction. And just because maybe, you know, if we're the educators wanting our students to do things and we want to sort of remind them or nudge them about stuff, maybe as the, on the other end as the learner who's embedded in their particular, you know, life practices, maybe that's not so great. So we've sort of got these two sides that we need to look at in terms of that. So the approach that I'm offering, what I'm exploring in my research and in education is this idea of blending design with somatics. Does anyone know what somatics is? No? Okay, that's not very good for the book that I'm about to write. Maybe that's why the books are needed. So I use the term somatics, but it's not a very commonly known word, certainly not in Australia. And it, you may know it better as things like mindfulness meditation, yoga, maybe even Pilates, Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, some forms of dance, any kind of, maybe the martial arts. Some form of practice or training that actually starts to cultivate your ability to be more sensitive, to sensory stimuli, to use your imagination, to pay attention in various ways. So can I get a show of hands? Could anyone do yoga or meditation in the room? Okay, cool. Okay, so you'll know what I'm talking about. Anyone dance? Sure you all do dance. Okay, just being shy. So somatics is defined, there's a whole field of study called somatics and Thomas Hannah, who was based in the United States, was very active in that field and he ran a whole journey around it. So in the 1970s he coined the term somatics as the experience of the lived body from within. So we're very, you know, a lot of the time, especially we're used to, in our society, used to looking and describing what we do from the outside. So we can describe how people walk and move and talk. But we're not necessarily that good at describing the experience from the inside. I think some cultures are better than others or maybe some disciplines are better than others are actually doing that and have a much more elaborate vocabulary at hand, the arts and performance in particular. And he also says that knowledge is constructed through experience and requires it to be directed or focused through awareness. So how we pay attention, what we're made aware of in the act of experiencing something is a key principle in somatics. So some of these ideas may actually resonate with how we think about pedagogy and learning and so forth. And in fact, these somatic practices are really, in some way, dealing with learning or unlearning the kinds of habit that we actually have in our sensory nervous systems. I'm using somatics as an exemplary practice that allows us to do these sorts of things, to actually cultivate presence. Many of these practices like yoga and meditation or the martial arts are using our bodies as tools to learn with, looking at how we're relating to our environment, how we're relating to other entities in it, how we deal with forces and all kinds of stimuli. So a lot of these practices actually use the technique of slowing down. So we want to break out of the natural attitude about everyday life, the normal speeds we're operating at. And if you start to slow down, other kinds of information becomes available to us to pay attention to. And in terms of that sort of qualities of attention, the fact that you can attend to things in very different ways and they will give you certain kinds of feelings or insights into the phenomena you're interested in. These practices also develop your sensory appreciation. So we are a very visual culture. We're bombarded with a lot of images all the time, a very strong visual language, but often at the expense of the other senses. So how well do we listen? How well do we feel things? How well do we use our kinesthetic sense of movement as well in the world? As well as taste and smell. So somatics in some ways allows you to sort of pay more attention to these and through various techniques and working communities that are developing these skills, begin to build your sensory appreciation. And that gives you a practice of discernment. So discernment is the ability to discriminate between different qualities of something. It's probably easier if I use the example of drinking wine. So I think most of you probably would have had a glass of wine. Maybe some of you consider yourself to be a wine connoisseur. I'm not very good at it. I like just drinking it. But if someone suggests to me maybe this wine smells like blueberries or something like that, then that's part of me being aware and paying attention to see, can I discern the scent of blueberries in this wine or not? So it's actually this feedback loop that happens between these sort of suggestions of someone more expert in a particular practice to the novice that starts to actually build your ability to discern at finer and finer detail. And then lastly, in terms of, how can we use this kind of these discernment and qualities of attention, hopefully in evaluating what is the impact of the things we design, the technologies we use on our lived somatic experience? So how do we actually register these things in our body, in our body-mind, using our sensory experience or faculties to actually gauge what is happening and how it affects how we feel and the quality of well-being? So I mentioned the term wine connoisseur, but my colleague in Canada, Tekla Shipost, who's a pioneer in this field, she has written a paper about this term somatic connoisseur. So you can, in the way that you can develop your appreciation of wine, which is more to do with taste and smell, you can also do the same thing with how you use all your bodily senses and become a somatic connoisseur or develop your somatic sensibility, as we say. Sorry about all the text. So in terms of somatics and design education, especially if you're working in more technical fields, it's probably something quite radical. If you're working in the arts and humanities, maybe it seems more familiar. I don't know if there are things like, doing sensory ethnographies is quite common in those kinds of fields. But I've also found, just from my experience in teaching in universities for the last 15 years, that there's quite a distrust of using the body. So it's considered trivial, that this is the place of higher learning for the mind, but the mind is only in your head. When in fact, if you think about theories of a body cognition, we're really looking at the whole body, the whole sensory nervous system as being part of your mind or how you think. So when you start to, my question is, what models of the self are we working with? And how are they implicating what we do when we design things and when we educate people as well? There can be a whole bunch of tacit assumptions about these models that are below the surface of awareness, that we just bring into the work we do. And so in teaching students to be good designers, I'm also looking at how we can surface those assumptions, what kinds of models are we working with so that we're not just unconsciously putting them back into the products and learning experiences that we're designing as well. So I'm very interested in this holistic approach to the body and mind, that we can use both as an integrated entity in education and in design as well. And so we actually exercise all the senses in these modes of discovery and reflection that are a critical part of the learning process and also how I work with design education. So I'm particularly interested in how we can, how can embodied ways of working with movement awareness be translated or infused into interactive technology design and use. This is more of a counter example. So this is one way you could go where you could look at, well, if you're interested in semantics and design and technology, you could look at a somatic practice and think about, okay, well, we have technology, why don't we put technology into that practice and make it better in some way? So there's quite a lot of these products out there, whether or not they're actually getting any traction or not, I don't know, but this one's called Move and it might have been on a Kickstarter or something, but they're basically saying that, okay, you have, if you want to improve your yoga practice, you should wear our suit, which has some kind of sensors in it, motion sensors. It also has vibration, vibration motors in it. And if you're not doing your posture correctly, then it's gonna sort of analyze you and go, maybe you need to, maybe that left hip's not quite, okay, and then you do a correction and then you're like, oh, good. But for anyone that's actually done yoga in the room, what's the objective of yoga? Is it correct posture? Meditation. Meditation, okay, that's, yep, okay. So it's more towards the inner experience of what's happening, the state of the mind and body. Can we get into some sort of state of flow when we're doing this practice? Of course, having a bad posture is not good. It's also about alignment as well. But I think sometimes these kinds of innovations are sort of missing the point a bit and just instrumenting the body and trying to sort of monitor it and nudge it without, for me who has done a lot of yoga as well, I sort of look at this and go, why would I want to wear this? Do I want to be in the middle of my practice and have this thing vibrating on me all the time because I'm not doing it right? Wish could be highly frustrating. So I'm interested in working in the, maybe the opposite, sometimes this, but also the opposite direction. So how can you actually take some of the principles or qualities from somatic practice as an infuse them into how we design things or how we actually approach education? So this brings me to this design methodology that I developed when I was doing my PhD and in talking to Petra in the lead-up to the talk, they seemed quite interested in this particular methodology. So I'm still working with it. I finished my PhD thing was in 2008 and for me it's a way of bringing together these three perspectives. So when you're working with interactive technologies or when you're designing them and thinking about how to actually develop these kinds of products, my whole take was that you really need to work with these three different perspectives and integrate them. So we have the machine perspective which is really looking at, okay, in terms of what is, the machine is a general term for the system and what is it actually seeing through its, whatever you choose to be the senses that you use, how is it seeing the world through those and then how does that actually link back to the people that are using it in some way? So I was looking at movement-based interaction so I was very interested in, depending on the kind of senses you use, whether it's a video camera or some kind of accelerometer, how is the computer system basically constructing a model of the human or the body through that, which would be a very limited model and then balancing that with what was the person who might be moving and interacting, what were they actually doing? So that's why we have the observer perspective and the first person experiential. So the observer is very much me watching you interacting and looking at you from the outside and then also putting you within various kinds of social or cultural frameworks about how what you're doing or moving actually fits within larger kinds of social constructs. And so, and then, but more importantly is also to make sure that we had the experience of the first person, what they're actually, what's informing how they're moving and why they're moving and what is their actual experience of that and being able to access that particular experience in various ways and make sure it's flowing through in your design process in some way. So sometimes people say, well, that's just, it's really hard to describe what I'm doing and feeling and researchers also say as well, how do we get to this somatic experience? But you can get there, maybe not completely. And so I've been developing various methods and other researches have and how you can get to this sort of lived experience and try to make sure that it stays alive in the design process. Now, an important part of this methodology that I use is this idea of making strange or de-familiarization or de-habituation. They're all turned to the same thing. And I'm very big on it in terms of learning because I think that especially with my students we come into a particular subject together. I usually set them some sort of project to do or learning objectives. But before you come up with some sort of design solution, I think it's very good to really mess up like the context that you're working in and the materials you're working within. It comes back to this idea of the models that we tacitly assume and put into our products and systems. So for example, if you're working with movement, how can you actually, instead of thinking, well, okay, if I wanna interact with a connect camera, I should be doing this because that's what it's designed to do, then all you're gonna get is various versions of this for your interaction models. So I'm saying, well, why don't we go back to some first principles and actually look at de-familiarizing movement and look at some unusual ways of working with it that can maybe create an interesting soup of ideas and imaginings that may come up with something more interesting for interaction. So making strange going back to this though is a tactic that's commonly used in art and design practices, also in ethnography, for disrupting habitual perceptions. So the way we usually perceive things and our ways of thinking as well. So our mind is programmed to recognize patterns and it does it very well. It does it with the sort of minimal amount of information possible. And so we do have a sort of, as you would know that you end up having these habits, these routines and habits of perception that allow you to just do things very easily. We have learned particular skills. So we're sort of in this interesting space, especially when you're designing things about doing things sort of on autopilot and on habit, but there may be also wanting to undo that as well so that we can actually find new ways of doing things. So I'm very interested in this space and various tactics for doing that. So this idea of learning, unlearning and relearning. And that really talks us to this tension between skill and dehabituation. So we may have learned to do something very well. Maybe I've learned to sit on the chair in a particular way. And then I might ask you to actually unlearn how you sit on that chair. Can you find a different way of sitting on that chair that's really out of the ordinary? Would you like to do that now? I will get you to do some exercises, but maybe not that one. And so this kind of thinking is really underpins a lot of somatic practices, but one in particular that I've also been going to class is with a Feldenkrais Awareness Removement Lessons. Has anyone here done Feldenkrais? Oh, cool, all right. So I think in Australia it's very uncommon, but Moshe Feldenkrais was originally from Eastern Europe and also spent some time, he was also Jewish and he lived in the first half of the 20th century. He was an engineer and a physicist and a very, very intelligent man. But he, I think in that period of time he actually became very well known. He developed this whole movement learning system after he actually had a long-term injury in his knee and then he made that his life work basically. So he was really sort of onto this idea of neuroplasticity before it became sort of proved through science and the idea we could actually reprogram our sensory motor nervous system and through doing things like dehabituating, putting constraints on our movements, we have to move in a different way to how we normally do on autopilot. So it's a very fascinating system and this idea that learning takes place through our bodies but also part of his method is that he asked you to do something like maybe do a very small movement. It could be just turning your head to the left. But he'll after that series of movements, he'll ask you to rest as well. So the idea is that the brain, our nervous system actually learning takes place when we're in a rest state. And so that's also another concern in terms of this constant bombardment by social media and other kinds of technologies is when do our brains actually rest? It's an interesting challenge I think that we have. And especially if you're going to bed, last thing you do at night is check your iPhone or whatever it is and you've got that, you're not actually allowing the brain to go into that rest state. Okay, so I'm gonna ask you to do something not learning how to sit on your chair differently but if you could just turn your head to the left to look at the person next to you as they turn to look at the person next to them. I just look back to the front again. So what, how did you do that? How did you use your body to do that action? Okay, maybe you know, maybe you don't know but I'll ask you to do it once more but now do it at half the speed you did. So which part of your body did you move? Neck? Okay, great neck. Anyone else? Eyes? Shoulders? Neck and shoulders. Anyone got any further down? Legs, vocal cords and you're laughing. Vocal cords and you're laughing in the act cool. Anything else, anyone further down? Back. Back legs. Okay, so there's some highly mobile people on the side of the room. This one's just head turning. Okay, so you might have noticed when you slow down you could actually pay more attention to what was happening and how you actually performed that action and that's really the key of what the Felt and Christ practice is. Slowing down, paying attention, being aware of how different parts of your body are organized in that particular act of moving. So what, there's an awareness room movement lesson probably several of them that actually would work with that action. But Moshe would say that the action is actually coming from way down here in your pelvis. So he's very interested in the head-to-tail connection, the spine and what's happening all along that in terms of recruiting movement. And in fact, so you could actually support that movement better by lifting up, having this upward action from your pelvis as it's grounding into the chair so that your whole spine and rib cage is turning as well. You probably find that as you're getting maybe older or if you just look at the computer all day long, you find it harder to do this. So then if you do, and as a person over there actually rotated their pelvis around, you can suddenly look right behind the room almost 360 degrees. Okay. So the key principle is in sensing yourself. So I'm really talking here about how we can use our bodies as a platform for learning and in this particular practice you slow down the movement and you move with awareness. And that's really the heart of these semantic practices that allow you to become more perceptually aware. Moshe's, Veldum Christ also works with this particular principle from a psychology called the Weber-Thecna Law. And that's most easily explained by saying, okay, if I was holding a heavy brick in this hand and a fly landed on it, would you be able to notice the weight of the fly on the brick? Probably not, unless you're hyper-hypersensitive. If you're holding a feather on the other hand and a fly lit on that feather, do you think you might be able to feel the weight of the fly? Potentially. So that's the principle basically in action. And so he took that principle as he was a physicist and applied it to this domain of movement learning and said, well, what we need to do is reduce the physical demand on the body. So instead of using highly vigorous movement, if we can use very gentle movement and slow down and move slowly in small increments, we'll actually be able to notice more. So your perceptual discrimination will improve and actually your control over those movements will improve as well. So you might have noticed that maybe you're walking and you've got this thing going on and you can't really control what's happening on that leg. So he'll put you through a whole range of very fine adjustments of sequences that start to work all the fine muscles in the body and in the sense sort of wake up what's happening and reconfigure how the body actually organizes to allow you to perform the action with more efficiency is his whole thing. Interestingly, also in the somatic practices in Feldenkrais, you use your own body or self as a reference, as a measuring stick. So often in the class, you might go to a one hour class and the teacher will ask you to lie down at the beginning on the floor and to scan and just pay attention to how your body is sensing the floor and what parts are connecting and where you're feeling tight and all that sort of stuff. So you're kind of getting a, you're registering what's going on and it's a baseline because then when you've done some of the exercises, you then lie down again and you're asked to just kind of sense, what's the change? How do I feel now? And you can feel differences. So maybe things were feeling a bit uneven, maybe they've evened out, maybe you've got a greater sense of flow, maybe your breathing is able to travel right down. Feels like to your toes rather than stopping here. And walking as well is used as an iconic movement pattern where you can start to see the influences of what you just did in a particular awareness through movement lesson. So I find it a really fascinating practice and there are a number of researchers in human computer interaction that are looking at these practices and how they can be infused into technology design. So not just myself. So another important part of somatic practice is this idea of de-familiarizing perception and what I just mentioned was some ways of doing it but I've also been the body where the performance training practice that I do is does a lot of this kind of work. And so I asked a performance maker, Linda Luke, in to give a workshop to my students, my master of interaction design students, only last week. We're actually working out on site. So on the Catechal Green in the university and they have to come up with this sort of playful design, playful experiences on these different sites. So they really need to be able to read that site in a fairly deep way, not a superficial way. So I thought it'd be great for them to actually go through some de-familiarization techniques to get them to look at the world more closely. So a lot of people just use, it's a beautiful park area there but it's on the way to the train station. So a lot of people are just zooming through on their way to their class or on the way to station. Some people hang out on the green, on the chairs and so forth. And they've just recently put some ping pong tables in so that's pretty cool, that's good fun. But when we first asked students to sort of map the space and take notice of the different sensory stimuli there, you know, there was a level of engagement but there was a little bit of a, okay, so we've done this and now what sort of thing? You know, what do we make of this? And how engaged were they, how deeply were they able to actually engage with the different sort of senses and describe them? So I thought, okay, then it can come in and do this workshop where we do a lot of stuff with de-familiarizing perception. So this is the mirror walk. And this one, you have a small mirror and you place it just around here, just below, around your nose and you're basically looking at the world upside down. And you have, we walked, did a very slow walk, we walked around in trails. So you're seeing the world upside down. It really, it's a very unusual way of looking at things. You get to see the undersides of trees, of buildings and it feels quite sort of cinematic as well. So hopefully in doing that, you're actually bringing people into a very, a state of alertness and, you know, being highly attentive to what's going on around them. Obviously because you can't, you're not using, you can't see the ground either. So you really have to pay attention so you don't like fall over. But you're seeing the world hopefully in a new way. We also do this one a little bit later in the day. I really love this exercise. It's the, I call it the collaborative, collaborative string in mouth slow walk. And so it's a tux. So we thought, okay, compared to the previous workshop we've done with students, we said, well, go and do a sensory ethnography, just, you know, observe, describe the different stimuli as such as the visual, the sounds, the temperature and the site and so forth. That was okay. We thought let's set them these slightly challenging tasks as you ask them to really pay attention and notice things. And so this one, it's a piece of string that you have to hold in your mouth. And so you're connected to the person next to you. And so the idea is to walk in a straight line and you could do this with your eyes closed or not, but you have to sense where the person is next to you through the string. So it's a sort of mediated contact person next to you. And they were walking down this grassy verge. So we're also with that one, also playing a little bit with like in terms of interventions in sight, what's it look like when you put, you know, a row of bodies there when they're walking at a particular speed and so forth. But for this one, I think the students that really brought them into, I think the heart of the exercise, and they really, you could feel that sort of energy shift in the space that they were really present. They were trying to walk with each other and, you know, really they're in the moment. And I think so it's interesting, I mean to sort of find out how this kind of, this kind of technique might flow into their design thinking from now on. Okay, and a little exercise for you. So a lot of this is about slowing down. And you might think, oh yeah, I know how to walk slowly, but do you? So in the practice, the body with a practice, we do a lot of speed change things. And one of the easy things to do is to start just walking, you know, you walk at a certain speed, normal pace. And then we, I just asked you like before to sort of harb speed and then harb it again. And then it might be again. And we get down to a point where, okay, let me just see if I can do this. Tricking the shoes. Maybe down to one centimeter per second. And then we also do this practice called bicycle, which is slow speed work, but at one millimeter per second. Now that's super challenging. I'm not gonna ask you to walk, but what you can do is interesting exercise is called bicycle hands. And you're gonna move your hands very slowly. But if you just put your hands out in front, obviously you can see them. And you can do this with your, so one hand, just close one hand, open it, close the other one, open it, and then do them opposite directions at the same time. Yeah. So that's the action you're going to perform. Right. So we'll start with it in one position. You can either do it with your eyes closed or open, and we're just going to spend a minute where you're going to move your hands as slowly as possible, one closing and the other one opening. Okay. Ready, go. Okay, that's one minute. Anyone like to share anything or chat with your neighbor about what you just experienced or noticed? Sorry. What do you want to say to anyone? Hey. She's got it. Hopefully we're talking about your hands. All right, so that was an example of slow speed. And in the body weather practice, we do total body arch whole speed like that as well. But you often get to these sort of crisis points in the movement, when you're suddenly down here and, oh my God, I'm moving at one millimeter per second, you can't actually do it. But it's very interesting in taking you to sort of those edges of sort of the impossible as well. Okay. I just noticed I'm probably running out of time a little bit. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about this project which is around the aesthetics of slow walking that I'm doing in collaboration with Frank Felton from RMIT is actually doing a PhD with me. He's an industrial designer and musician. And it's been developing these sound responsive surfaces. They have pressure sensors in them which is not like a new thing, but what he's looking at is actually the quality of the sound and how it connects back to a somatic experience in the body. So we've been doing studies with some dancers, with our butto dancers, and also with Feldenkrais practitioners to try and understand what's going on in that act of walking and how we can use sound, the sort of responsive sound to actually slow people down and open up different kinds of kinesthetic experiences. And so it's very interesting in that the two studies with like the Feldenkrais practitioners were very much very committed to their practice and their way of walking. And the sound was providing them information. So part of the information may be about an unevenness in their gait and things like that, but they weren't so, they couldn't see how this kind of surface could connect to their practice in any way. It was like, well, okay, we tried that, but okay, leave it over there. Which I'm surprised at, because much of Feldenkrais I'm sure was very much about how we use our bodies in everyday living and the environment, where we are coupled to all kinds of objects and structures and systems, be they physical or virtual as well. So that was unfortunate, so it didn't really go anywhere, but the butto dancers on the other hand, and maybe also because they do use slow walking in their practice and work with these ideas of imaginative worlds. We had a much broader range of responses around what happened and around how the sound evoked different kinds of images and qualities that actually supported them moving in new ways, like in unexpected ways, which is what we're interested in. So just back in terms of my methodology, in terms of those three perspectives, the machine, the observer and the first person experience, so that's what we're really applying in this study. As you can see, one of the dancers here walking very slowly, so you can't hear the sound, but we're doing a range of different observational techniques and analysis in terms of understanding what's going on with that walking pattern. This is more from a kind of like a gate analysis and how you use your foot in contact with the floor, and then also applying things like a bar movement analysis, which is a system that has, it's a very highly developed system for describing different facets of movement, also in terms of the kind of how you use weight, how you relate to space, and the idea of flow in movement and also how you relate to time. So different kinds of, this would be like the observer perspective, looking at the body from the outside and putting it within different systems. And then also of course the first person movers perspective, so in this particular study, we're asking the dancers to describe what was happening while they were working on the surface, also what was, how were they responding to the sound, the different kinds of sound options we gave them, and what kind of kinesthetic experience was happening, how were they aware, how did the use of sound actually shift how they normally relate to their body in walking? So we're trying to get into that kind of digging into that terrain, so we could feed that back into how we designed the interactive sound components. And so at the moment, Frank's really looking at this idea of these sort of ease in, ease out envelopes, and also playing with one, we did another study together, more for a performance done at RMIT, part of Performing Mobilities Conference, so this is me, I like dressing up. This is the Interstellar Movementistians, a little bit of a sort of Star Trek nod there to Spock. And so we thought we'd actually do a performance on these pressure plate surfaces and really look at how we work with shifting of balance, very slow movements, and this idea of sort of going off balance as a creative act as well. So we worked together on this particular one. Just so you can get an idea, it doesn't look very exciting, I know, but there was more to the performance than this, but just so you can hear there's a number of different sounds, some sort of gurgling, bubbling creaks to sound of wind, and then there's more sort of sci-fi sounds that come in later. So we were looking at how to design for this kind of interaction, very slow movement, subtle shifts, and then I recorded this bit here as me explaining how I was working with the foot in contact with that surface. So we know our hands as highly agile instruments, sources of embodied knowing, but the feet can also be viewed in that way. I've related to my foot. Instead of just thinking of it as one unit, so I place on the floor, which I think we normally do on walking, it's just a very utilitarian thing. I actually think about it with many degrees of freedom, so there's all the different bones and feet that you can articulate, and which part of the foot I'm placing onto the platform, and that point of contact, which is what we're playing with in the performance, there's the first point of contact because you can just whack the foot down and get an instant rhythm sound for an effect. Get it into the spot, or I can place the foot very lightly on the surface. There's no sound, but as I start to pour my weight into my leg down into my foot, and thinking about which parts, which part of the foot is making the most contact with the, okay, finally, I notice that as I start to move my weight right over the top of my right leg, I've got maximum pressure down into the floor surface, and hopefully the sound is coming off, but of course, when I move my foot to the edge of the floor, I've got more response. And then I can feel it ease off, so I've got that whole surface of my foot that has now got many possibilities to control what you're going to start, but the rest of my body has to support as well, so I'm good with playing a little bit. Okay. So in that particular system too, one of the things we're doing, a lot of these, especially when they're in public space context, where you get people just jumping on them, and it's very immediate, I get some sort of feedback going on, but we're trying to look into more of the nuances of that kind of what's happening in that response and how you could actually have an evolving response or behavior in the sound emerge, so that if you sort of lingered there or put more pressure on in a very slow way, you'd start to get different kind of sound effects coming up. So that's something kind of getting a reward for actually slowing down and paying attention. That was sort of part of the thinking in that particular project. A similar thing's actually going on in another project I'm doing at the moment called DIAD Dance Study, where we're looking at again, this tension between sort of immediate feedback and understanding how the system is working interactively to then having this sort of more surprise or an evolving behavior of the system that will actually promote curiosity so that you don't get bored after going, oh, I move it, it does this, I get a sound response. So these are the Distributed Interactive Audio Devices that I'm collaborating with Olly Bowne from USW Art and Design and Sam Ferguson for UTS. They're actually building this system and also working with another dancer, Kirsten Packham. So we're looking at these more sort of improvisatory tools and so we're doing a number of sessions, looking at how to actually work with different, some of the different sound parameters. It's an interesting system because Olly is a creative coder so he's got it, it's all wireless, it has motion sensor in it and a speaker actually built in so the whole thing's like a unit you take around. But from the main computer, he can actually program things on the fly. He can download different code, tweak the parameters and so forth. So you could actually do a live performance where he was changing things as they go or we could just have it and sort of set the system. But within those two there's this sort of evolving behavior. The interesting thing we're finding in this study is that what the sound guy I think is really cool, the dancers are not like so excited about. So it's interesting getting these different disciplines where they're like, oh, really cool sound and you know kind of like the insides of the codes, you sort of know it's doing this really cool thing. But as a dancer listening to it and having movement possibilities where like that thing is really annoying, we don't want to hear that anymore kind of stuff. You know, can we do something more subtle? Can we do something more yummy in the sound? So it's an interesting process we're still working on at the moment, hoping to move towards some kind of improvised performance. But we've got to get like the sound quality, we've got to get that sorted because these sorts of devices, I have a tendency to get quite annoying quite quickly because the sound can be quite repetitive. Okay, I think I might, so for that one though, okay, in terms of actually this going back to the first person experience and trying to document how the dancers, what did I just do? I just spent 10 minutes improvising with this device, moving around, using on different parts of my body, listening to the sound, but what just happened? So we found that if we left it too long that we were being really good to start with and had this very structured like, okay, we'll do half an hour and then there's a questionnaire you fill out and all this sort of stuff. And then we did one session where we ran out of time and so it was all being video recorded. Well, look, we'll just come back a couple of days time, look at the video and we'll be able to describe what our experience was. So video cue recall is a technique we sort of used before on stuff. But for this one, it had gone. We just couldn't really remember all the interesting details about what was motivating that movement and how it felt and what the sound was doing. So that was a little bit of a oops, okay, what we really need to do is this, our preferred method is we might explore for say 10 minutes or half an hour and then we immediately do stream of consciousness writing. So we don't go into the evaluative headspace. We don't get analytic. We just dump what we're immediately thinking about and experiencing. And that can be, it won't be neatly written in terms of good grammar and all that sort of stuff, but it's just getting out immediate sensations, the impressions, your imaginings, the strategies we're using to, in that sort of interactive sound movement nexus and any points of interest. Then we talk and share. Then if there's a group of us or the dancers will actually share what we just experienced. We may re-perform and talk aloud. So I might be, you might grab that ball again and go, oh, okay, I was doing this with it. This was happening. So it's immediately like a reenactment or embodied co-discovery. But we try and, the other dancer then tries and mimics what the other person's doing to figure out what was going on. After all that, then we actually do some more structured analytic evaluations. So I've got this questionnaire where we're trying to figure out, what are the different trade-offs in this kind of thing. So that's important, that order's important. If you're trying to work with lived experience, immediate experience, you can't get analytic too quickly because it sort of destroys the experience or the immediate quality. So I would recommend something more like this, more from a sort of stream of consciousness writing, is probably gonna be more effective. I think I'm gonna leave it there. Just to end and say that one of the takeaways here is that by doing these kinds of somatic trainings we can actually become more perceptive and aware in this world in which we act. And so you may think, okay, those kinds of practices are sort of over there somewhere, but if you bring them into design and education that can actually have a very efficacious impact on your sensing and perception and your imagination as well. So just to end, I'm writing a book with Techless Shipost and it's around this idea of experience as skill, the fact that we have experiences but we can also through these kinds of practices develop experiential acuity. And that's going back to some of the things I mentioned before that we actually can train our observational skills, how we discern the world, our focus and how we can actually synthesize those various perspectives across first person, observer and machine and also be more, cultivate some sort of empathic relationship with the world around us. Okay, I'll leave it there. Thank you very much. Any questions? Anyone like to ask a question? Oh, yes? Thank you very much. I was really enjoying that. I see some parallels with the slow dancing you were describing and how we interact with machines and interfaces and the sort of things we're designing in education that if we really slow down and look at our interactions with the technologies, that way that we can really make those technologies perform better in the dance with us, basically. So I was reflecting on that. I just wanted to share that with you. So I found that very useful. Thank you. Yeah, another way I think of this kind of maybe slow choreography of interaction with devices. I think, yeah, it's an interesting tension because obviously we like things to happen really quickly as well. We like to get faster reaction times and so forth. So we don't want sort of slow internet, but we do, yeah, how do you create spaciousness within that kind of flow of interactions and interesting questions. So yeah, thank you. Yeah, just behind. Thank you. You talked earlier about questioning the tacit assumptions that we make when we consider the model of our body or the model of our design. How do you do that? Because if you think about, I'm trying to think about what are the tacit assumptions I'm making in my design? And I can't get past the fact that I've already assumed them. I don't know what they are. So what's some ways we can actually do that, figure out what are the assumptions we're making? Yeah, that's a good question. Just trying to think of an example. Yeah, it's interesting. As an educator, I set these projects for students and assessment, ask them to do various things, but students don't always react in the way that you expect as well. But I think sometimes that happens better in conversations. So when I was running a design studio last year, I set the topic on healthy workplaces. So it was looking at body-based interactions, wearable technology, and this idea of the healthy workplace and how we could actually encourage people to be more active and so forth. So I was lucky to have quite a small number of students, like only about less than 20 students in the class. And so we did a variety of things. Because it was all about trying to disrupt the workplace and how we sit and various things like that. I changed the classroom so that we had a variety of things to sit on. You could sit on the floor, on a cushion, on a normal chair and all that sort of stuff. So we went around and talked about our different kinds of practices and how we use our bodies at work, how we use them at home, and things like that. And just try to have a conversation. Because a lot of students also from different international students as well. So there's a whole range of cultures already in the classroom. So I think having some sort of way of structuring or scaffolding that discussion, asking people to actually do enact things so you can actually see what people do. And then we can critique and bring to the surface that sort of stuff. So even something as simple as walking, we think is everyone walks the same. But if you look closely at different groups of people or different cultures, we know that there are different kinds of philosophies informing how you use the body in walking as well. So a lot of Asian cultures, it's a more weighted approach to the ground. They were also probably not now in our modernized world, but previously there was a lot more squatting went on too. So those kinds of ways of thinking. And in our Western world, we tend to equate squatting with something dirty and inappropriate and indiscreet. But it's actually very good for your actually pelvic system. And so even those kinds of practices, just trying to have these discussions about things or try things out that you may get unexpected responses from as well. I don't know if I've really answered your question, but yeah, it's not a one-off thing. So it's having a number of different techniques to get people to start to try to surface some of that stuff. So for example, I'm seeing a lot of these posture correction innovations out there. You can wear this little device. It's going to basically look when you're slouching. And then supposedly you're meant to correct your posture. But what is correct posture? So that's again where I'd be saying, what is your assumption about correct posture? How do we use the body to sit up? In the Feldenkrais work, actually posture is not static. So it's a dynamic thing. So then if you're designing for a static posture, it's very different than if you're designing for this idea that body should always be or can move or should be moving a lot. So you'd come up with different kinds of solutions. So it's even just those sorts of models that we take the granted. We all think we know what correct posture is, but maybe there are other better ways to think about it or other ways. Thank you. Yeah, Tom? You mentioned something about model selves. Can you talk more about the model selves? Models, models of self. I think that's what that, yeah, my example just then when the posture was getting at, this sort of the model of the self that is usually a cultural model. And but even within a culture there may be other alternatives that we might want to actually think about and design for. And even the model of the self, it going back to the idea of body cognition or alternatives that where we're just thinking of the mind or cognition and learning happening here. But if you want to involve the total body, then you're going to get different kinds of, you're going to go down different sort of direction. I think maybe in the learning realm, I mean, especially in learning where we've moved from an individual or the transmission model to then social constructivism and things like that as well. So as long as it's, I think there's a questioning there and an agreement that we're working with a certain kind of model. Sometimes that discussion doesn't happen. And then everyone's falling back on their tacit assumptions, which may not be the same or healthy or, yeah, so it's good to just surface them in some way. Or to read other kinds of philosophies where you find new ways of thinking about things. So I guess I'm heavily influenced by Eastern philosophies, which very much have the mind body as an integrated system. And a lot of their practices, you have to cultivate the body to actually change the mind as well. So they're not like a separate thing. Whereas in Western society, we tend to have exercise for one thing and then we go and do our learning with our mind somewhere else. So I'm interested in those kinds of practices and theories that actually blend the two as well. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. I so loved your presentation. Thank you so much. You didn't use the word spirituality, but you've just touched on it now. And sorry, I'm gonna read what I've formulated a question when you were talking. So I guess I work in the area of spirituality. Theology is what my institution's been teaching for over a hundred years. And we use the language of discernment of I and the other, the soul embodiment, models of self, forming the whole self, that kind of thing, right? But then we retreat into these models and like you've said, those tested assumptions, those models of delivery and educational design and assessment that is systematic, disembodied, sanitized, boundaryed, and we kind of cover over diversity. It's not a good situation often. So that causes exploration in the classroom to tend to be theoretical as opposed to kind of lived in experience. So everything you've just kind of been talking about. And I love the ideas of making strange and off balance, but there's a perceived risk in that for teachers. Can you imagine how technology and your research could help this more traditional field of arts and humanities? Well, we have the language, we're thinking, but it's so theoretical, it's not in here. And yet, in a sense, that's our job in the world is to do that. And our images and our art kind of express that. How would your research help us kind of shed that straight jacket and emerge from it? Yeah, it's still a very challenging area. I love the question. Thank you, in your comments. And it does call into question, like what do we think our role as educators are? So I don't think I, sometimes it's easy to fall back into that mode of, okay, I've got to teach students, here's this bit of, I'm teaching them about interface design, okay, here's all the content, I've got to get it out. It's easy to fall back into that. I think that's, and you have to have that sort of in place, but then how do you then design a whole learning experience that can stray into some of these other realms? I think that's why I've been bringing in, for example, Linda Lut, the performance maker, bringing in people that can do workshops that are working, well, I make the connection between that kind of practice or de-familiarization practice and how it links into the actual subject we're dealing with. But it gives students an embodied experience that could be quite unusual to what they're normally dealing with. But I need to sort of make the links or provide some sort of intellectual scaffold around that. And it's also about giving permission. I think it's very much, you know, this is, it's okay, we're doing this now. This may not be what you expect to do when you come to university, but if you put it in a certain kind of framework, I mean, I do like challenging students and I think not just mentally, but also if you actually have a fully embodied experience or something, you're going to, that's gonna really resound with you in some way and give you some kind of like felt material to actually reflect on it and work back in. That's mainly what I'm trying to do at the moment is infuse the learning trajectory with these kinds of embodied experiences, but show how they're giving us some kind of embodied insight into things that may be philosophy or maybe design theories or design methods, things like that, so thank you. I think I'm done, so thank you again. Thank you Moodle Moot for having me to speak. I will stick around a little bit in the tea break if anyone wants to talk a little bit further and I hope you have a really wonderful conference. Thank you.