Bodily Orientations Around Mobiles: Lessons Learnt in the Island Nation of Vanuatu

Paper: Bodily Orientations Around Mobiles: Lessons Learnt in Vanuatu [ACM reference]

Abstract:

Since we started carrying mobiles phones, they have altered the ways in which we orient our bodies in the world. Many of those changes are invisible to us – they have become habits, deeply engrained in our society. To make us more aware of our bodily ways of living with mobiles and open the design space for novel ways of designing mobiles and their interactions, we decided to study one of the last groups of users on earth who had not been exposed to mobiles: the people of Vanuatu. As they had so recently started using mobiles, their use was still in flux: the fragility of the mo- bile was unusual to them as was the need to move in order to find coverage. They were still getting used to carrying their mobiles and keeping them safe. Their encounters with mobile use exposed the need to consider somaesthetics practices when designing mobiles as they profoundly affect our bodily ways of being in the world.

Excerpts (much more in full paper):

Brian had apparently completely forgotten the presence of the mobile phones hanging down from his neck, which was an extremely common way for people in Rah to carry their phones around. He was engaged in an everyday activity. As Jorege put it at one time: “sometimes we just lean over to look at something, or to get some water out of the canoe […] we forget that we have the phone on our chest [laughter] and then the phone goes in the water [followed by generalized laughter]”.

Above we identified the […] following themes:

• Somaesthetic implications: tensions in posture or muscles from wearing mobiles
• Competing for bodily space: wearing the mobile requires finding a ‘space’ on your body where it can be worn

We need to better understand how technology, like mobiles, alters our bodily ways of being in the world: the movements of our body, the stiffening of certain muscles, the way we move through the landscape, how we appropriate it, wear it and find bodily and social space for it. Obviously, this process is developing over time – we get a socio-digital material (or socio-bodily-digital material) that is over time, more or less, fitted to the setting. But, by altering the design, we might alter body schemas to be better adjusted to social norms, bodily practices, but also better adjusted to what is somaesthetically pleasing — giving rise to better experiences with the device.