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Somatosensory Activation and Attentional States in Creative Making

Katherine Rees

arXiv:2609.09960v1cs.HC

TL;DR

Across disciplines, scholars describe a similar experience in making, while attention and responsiveness may reflect cognitive load or developed ability with tools. The study combined iterative prototyping and workshops with researcher participation, using wearable touch technologies to investigate creative movement-making. Prototype use heightened participants’ appreciation of the body and somatoperception, while their relations with the prototypes ranged from reacting to stimuli to working alongside them with attention linked to metacognition.

  • Problem

    Across disciplines, scholars describe a similar experience in making, while attention and responsiveness may reflect cognitive load or developed ability with tools.

    Source: §2 · p. 2

  • Method

    The study combined iterative prototyping and workshops with researcher participation, using wearable touch technologies to investigate creative movement-making.

    Source: §1 · p. 1

  • Results

    Prototype use heightened participants’ appreciation of the body and somatoperception, while their relations with the prototypes ranged from reacting to stimuli to working alongside them with attention linked to metacognition.

    Source: §7 · p. 5

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    The paper recommends exploring other somatosensory technologies and embodied research to examine attentional states and connect what is felt, considered, and materialised.

    Source: §7 · p. 5

    The prototypes did not facilitate straightforward mediation because they consistently produced tactile sensation on the skin, and use duration and familiarisation were factors.

    Source: §6 · p. 4

Abstract

from arXiv · show

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.

1 Introduction

The introduction frames creative movement-making as embodied research, using iterative prototypes and workshops to investigate real-time interaction. Its approach positions the researcher as a participant who can learn and co-create with dancers.

1 Introduction

  • The project examined creative movement-making with body-worn technology, including a vibrating bracelet and an inflatable waistband that applied pressure.Workshops of 4–9 hours focused on the practices of six professional dancers and choreographers with varied movement backgrounds.Source: §1 · p. 1
  • An inductive, practice-led approach supported iterative prototype development and qualitative data collection through project-based workshops.The researcher moved among facilitator, learner, and co-participant roles, developing an empathetic understanding of real-time interaction.Source: §1 · p. 1
  • The following sections connect creative making and awareness of creative decisions with attention, sensory information, embodied research, kinaesthesia, and project findings.Source: §1 · pp. 1–2

2. Attention and awareness in creative making

This section frames attention in creative making as an ongoing relation among maker, material, body, and environment. It connects sensory experience and technological engagement with varied attentional states and awareness.

2. Attention and awareness in creative making

  • Creative tool use can involve ongoing low-level attention to affordances and a flow between material, maker, and thinking.Malafouris and Koukouti call the maker–material interaction in moment-to-moment creative decisions “haptic attentive unity”.Source: §2 · p. 2
  • Design research links somatic and multisensory experience with ideation, imagination, memory, and meaning-making.Interactive body-worn systems may extend perception, imagination, and bodily experience.Source: §2 · p. 2
  • Dance technologies can enable multiple states of presence, while multisensory choreography can restructure senses and require attention to multiple information sources.Source: §2 · p. 2
  • Ingold describes indirect attention to both material and environment as practitioners adapt to environmental changes, resonating with De Spain’s “decentred intentionality” in interactive improvisation.Source: §2 · p. 2
  • Accounts differ on whether attentional shifts reflect cognitive load or developed tool-use abilities, motivating the section’s focus on bodily awareness in dance.Source: §2 · p. 2

3. Embodied Research

Embodied research treats physical participation and sensory exchange as ways to connect lived experience with analysis. It also foregrounds researcher reflexivity and the coconstruction of meaning in researcher–participant dialogue.

3. Embodied Research

  • Dance ethnography combines movement-analysis systems with researchers’ physical knowledge of learning dances.Physical engagement can deepen understanding through varied levels of immersion.Source: §3 · p. 2
  • Treating the body as lived reality brings researchers’ training, habits, and sociocultural influences into view, with reflexivity helping confront bias and frames of reference.Source: §3 · p. 2
  • Sensory ethnography and attention to verbal and non-verbal exchange can connect experience with analysis and support coconstructed meaning [20, 21].Source: §3 · pp. 2–3

4. Kinaesthetic awareness

Kinaesthetic awareness links moving with feeling oneself move, and it can be developed through dance training and somatic practice. In this research, it supports interpretation across bodily experience and communication.

4. Kinaesthetic awareness

  • Kinaesthetic awareness is the “double act of moving and feeling oneself move”.It enables recognition in the moment and can be revisited during data analysis through embodied knowledge.Source: §4 · p. 3
  • Dance training and somatic practices can cultivate and develop bodily awareness during action.Source: §4 · p. 3
  • The researcher developed kinaesthetic awareness through prototype exploration and learning participants’ movement phrases, using it as a bridge between bodily understanding and communication.Participation, sharing, and decentring attention are linked to metacognition during creation.Source: §4 · p. 3

5. Prototypes and Workshops

Two wearable prototypes were developed through exploratory prototyping and user testing: a wrist vibration bracelet and an inflatable waist belt. Workshops combined movement recording and analysis with fieldnotes and participant interviews to interpret participants’ movement and experiences.

5. Prototypes and Workshops

  • The wrist bracelet delivered coded loops of varied haptic sensations, while the silicone waistband used a motorised pump to inflate and deflate at the body’s core.The prototypes were refined through iterative development and varied passive touch sensations.Source: §5 · p. 3
  • Figure 1 depicts the silicone inflatable belt used for the pump prototype.The belt provided pressure sensation at the core of the body.Source: Figure 1 · p. 3, §5 · p. 3
  • Workshop analysis combined video, modified Laban Movement Analysis, researcher fieldnotes, and participant interviews in individual and group matrices.The mixed methods let participants review experiences, physically revisit improvisation, and articulate intentions and responses to stimuli.Source: §5 · p. 3

6. Findings

With extended use, participants developed varied attentional relationships with digital touch, moving beyond simple reactions to stimuli. These relationships could support noticing and metacognition, although tactile stimulation did not become straightforwardly mediated.

6. Findings

  • Repeated tactile sensations disrupted typical kinaesthetic awareness, while participants alternated between synchronising with and ignoring rhythms through passive or intentional readjustments.Attention states were linked to participants’ stances toward the felt stimuli.Source: §6 · pp. 3–4
  • With extended prototype use, participants devised rule-based tasks that disrupted synchronisation and added a layer of exploration and experimentation.Their engagement alternated between direct interaction, opposition, and collaborative or co-existent modes.Source: §6 · p. 4
  • The prototypes did not provide straightforward mediation because they consistently produced tactile sensations on the skin, and duration of use and familiarisation also mattered.Source: §6 · p. 4
  • The proposed attention modes culminate in an alongside relationship combining hearing and listening, which supports noticing and metacognition; the study applies working relationships with technology at the micro-level of creative ideation and movement.The account distinguishes receiving information as “hearing” from active, selective attention as “listening.”Source: §6 · pp. 3–4
  • With extended use, most participants moved beyond simple stimulus reactions into varied attentional relationships; against or alongside the prototypes, movement was less influenced and more diverse.In some cases, stimuli disrupted movement creation, and participants’ intentions diverged from the resulting movement.Source: §6 · p. 4
  • Participants described the rhythms as supporting movement temporality and sometimes becoming a perceptual fulcrum, while another described heightened understanding of movement without necessarily moving differently.These accounts connect the prototypes with attention to movement rather than a consistent change in movement form.Source: §6 · pp. 4–5
  • Across the participant group, digital touch was associated with simultaneous “doing” and “noticing,” described through codes including “foci,” “fulcrum,” and “heightened awareness.”Two participants also drew on meditation skills while working with the prototypes.Source: §6 · p. 5
  • Noticing, filtering, and changing creative strategies is framed as self-monitoring and guiding embodied cognition, beyond reflection-in-action alone.Source: §6 · p. 5

7. Conclusion

The prototypes heightened participants’ appreciation of the body, with passive touch serving as a reference point and repeated sensations fostering awareness of space, time, and interior–exterior relations. Workshop analysis found varied ways of engaging with the prototypes and led to recommendations for further research.

7. Conclusion

  • Prototype use heightened appreciation of the body; passive touch served as a reference point, while repeated sensations fostered awareness of space and time across interoception and exteroception.The process bridged participants’ kinesphere.Source: §7 · p. 5
  • Participants’ engagement shifted among working through, with, alongside, and against the prototypes, including intentional departures from their suggested rhythms and sensations.Working alongside was linked to metacognition; some participants disrupted responses by diverging from established patterns or creating new rules.Source: §7 · p. 5
  • The combination of movement and tactile sensation suggests a new understanding of the body, facilitated by developed kinaesthesia and heightened awareness of fluid interior–exterior boundaries.Source: §7 · p. 5
  • Further exploration of technologies stimulating somatosensory perception could examine attentional states and optimal conditions for metacognition in creative action.The paper also recommends embodied research through watching, sharing, and learning to connect what is felt, considered, and materialised.Source: §7 · p. 5
  • Advances in neurotechnology and mobile EEG could provide more accurate brain data in action and additional ways to record states, body awareness, nervous-system activity, and cognition.Source: §7 · p. 5
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