Shifting Spaces: Using Defamiliarization to Design Choreographic Technologies That Support Co-Creation

Choreography includes much improvisation and situated decision-making. These embodied abilities have inspired recent trends in HCI to design systems for nuanced experiences of movement [1]. We look to defamiliarization as one tactic that can enable new perspectives in the creative process during otherwise familiar experiences. We became interested in more deeply analyzing the interaction between mover and choreographic systems when we discovered limitations when attempting to choreograph collaboratively with a variety of existing systems. This led us to look more closely at how defamiliarization has been used in existing human-computer interaction projects, to understand provocative interaction in a different domain. We then applied the same analysis to choreographic technology projects to confirm the creative options enabled by this framework. This paper presents a framework for co-creative systems that proposes analytical components of: Disorientation, Open-Play, Closed-Exploration, and Balanced Creativity. These components focus on design for choreography yet they can be applied to many creative domains. To test our framework, we also present a variety of speculative designs that would engage with a choreographer in the sensory exploration, movement generation, and composition processes.