Eila Goldhahn:
What can be learnt from the MoverWitness Exchange for the development of gesture-based human-computer interfaces?

Goldhahn holds a very cloudy talk about people being movers and witnesses, holds up Durer’s famous woodcut of perception drawing. I am totally missing the point. We the engineers should all be ‘movers’ as well? So we can share a more embodied knowledge with each other or with our ‘subjects’. Really, no idea what she is trying to get at. But it must be my limited engineer’s point of view or something.

Fortunately she is going to show us some videos. Perhaps it will become clearer now.
– A man is licking a wall, apprently enjoying a very deep sensory haptic embodied experience…
– A woman is looking like she needs to go to the bathroom…
– Ah, a nice one with people falling/flying. She mentions how associations and imagination can play a role in our perceptions (really?) and how these can mediate between the mover and the witness. Good point.

Asked about a more concrete example of what is missing in ‘our methods’ she points out how, in the talk by Stoessel on the elderly, how they could have engaged the movements of the elderly in a more open way. One could let the elderly talk about how they had experienced the movement and then see if this coincides with the ‘witness’s observation of the movement. Hmm, interesting.