Sissy - Elise van den Hoven

his instruments and where he pointed to the x-ray. The
shapes of the dentist and assistant also overlap in several
places. One is in the centre of the drawing, which is the
area of the patient’s mouth where the hands of the dentist
and assistant worked when performing a scale and polish.
Another is at the area behind the patient’s head where the
dentist and assistant passed materials back and forth.
In drawing this picture, the analyst struggled with how to
indicate some of the different kinds of movements. The
lines curling around the mouth and the lines reaching out
to the keyboard are intended to give an impression of the
way the hands were held and the quality of the
movements, but for other gestures it was not clear how to
do this.
Figure 5: 'Movement-bubbles' of the dental examination
To address this, another diagram was developed which
used a different way of indicating the movements. A
piece of paper was laid over the movement-shapes
diagram and ‘movement-bubbles’ were drawn indicating
where the different areas of movement with words
describing the quality of the movements (Figure 5).
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
In terms of developing our design thinking in the dentist
project, the activities described in this paper played an
important role. In a very literal way, they helped us get a
feel for the gestures and interactions of the dental surgery.
This changed the way we saw the problem of gesture
interface design from a question of what kind of gestures
to use, to one of what kind of gestures to use, and where
and when in the space of a dental examination. They are
not just analytic observations, but also design moves,
because they reframe relevant aspects of the setting for
consideration in the design process. In reflecting on the
reason that these activities were successful, it seems to us
that a key ingredient is that they required our active
bodily engagement and brought our own gestural abilities
to the fore. This contrasts with how video is often
discussed in HCI research, which is as a representation of
the embodied movements in the video. Video is an
8
attractive medium for recording and working with the
movements of the body in design – but it needs to be
brought into design through embodied engagement of
design process participants. Video is a design material in
this sense, and like any other material, it needs to be taken
hold of and worked with.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank our research colleagues who
participated in the design day and the dentists who
participated in our study. This work was supported by
Discovery grant DP0210470.
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