Our vision is to help #makeNormalBetter for all @scale
Our mission is to explore, develop, research, innovate, question how interactive technologies and services can be co-designed/tested to support that mission.
Our approach is: Inbodied Interaction to support TUNING as adaptation in context.
Inbodied Interaction proposes that if we align our tools with how we work, inside our bodied, as phyiological, neurological (and social) complex systems our tools will have a much better opportunitiy for success.
Tuning is proposed as a True North for evaluating these designs: do they help people TUNE what they are already doing to support personal, social, physical, mental, cognitive good, or wellbeing or performance – and remain healthy. A particular aspiration is to help build resiliance by supporting the Knowledge Skills and Practice to be able to TUNE oneself within a given context.
For example: what tools might we develop that can help people doing chronic shift work? that by an understanding of circadian processes in the body, can help them keep their body clocks and daylight clocks aligned to support health?
Another Example: Ahead of the COVID19 push to more and more people conencting with each other online, PhD candidate Ben Brooks, and an advanced HCI course in Human-Systems Interaction at the U of Southampton, have been taking an Inbodied Interaction approach to make online experiences better for virtual teams. They are exploring how what we know about our physiology in social interactions might be better supported in virtual contexts.
INVITATION: JOIN US
The WellthLab is itself a hybrid of physical meetings and international ongoing virtual collaborations, including UCSD, UNB, IBM, MIT. The Lab was started in 2016 and is lead by m.c. schraefel.
Please email wellthlab@nopain2.org if you are an HCI researcher and have a collaboration idea you’d like to explore in designing interactive tech from an inbodied perspective to help #makeNormalBetter for all @scale.
We are also hiring for post docs – keenly interested in computer science PhD’s who are passionate about innovating new tools/approaches to support people explore themselves, build new skills, and feel fantastic in a challenging world.
For more insight into what Inbodied Intearaction is, please see this Special Topic issue in Interactions Magazine for a set of short articles on Inbodied Interaction topics, including:
- an Overivew of Inbodied Interaction: the body as site of Adaptation
- Tuning for Health
- in5 as a model for instantiating Inbodied Interaction
- Discomfort Design – why getting uncomfortable is key for adaptation
- Measuring Inbodied Interaction: interoception, insourcing and outsourcing
- examples of Inbodied interaction from Smell, FatApestry, Chronobiology
RELATED ACTIVITIES:
- Previous CHI workshops in 2018 and 2019
- (our 2020 workshop – at CHI2020 – postponed due to Covid19)
- The Wellcomm Workshop at CSCW2019, Austin
- The Discomfort Design Workshop at UBICOMP 2019, London
- Last year’s International Inbodied Intearcion Summer School
- Courses including Inbodied Interaction 101 and Inbodied Interaction 102
(that were to run at CHI 2020 until the conference was cancelled in line with the rest of our planet) - this year’s physical Inbodied Interaction summer school is – due to covid19 – postponed while we investigate new ways to engage and learn together**