StoryBall

Early research for my doctoral thesis. My previous project In Search of the Blue Danube focused on walking as a spatial practice and how that practice informed my perceptions of the places I walked. Walking was used as a vehicle to literally transport me to locations in which I would be inspired by the environment I found myself in. Only occasionally was I aware of the felt experience of my body being integral to how I interpreted the walking experience, such as the rhythm of my breath while underneath a bridge, suggesting I was within the ribcage of a whale. Mostly, my focus was external. In contrast, Storyball was an attempt to turn my focus inward, exploring how a user might engage with stories through bodily gestures and interactions with a physical interface. I experimented with props and my own body to simulate use cases, documenting the experience through rich-descriptive note-taking and the creation of a video prototype.

I settled upon a ball, as an unobtrusive object that supported varied physical activities. I explored how a ball could move between body, environment, and others, combining actions such as placing, throwing, rolling, hitting, or holding the ball. I considered how interactions might connect to the rhythms of a story, using common rhythmical patterns used in English poetry. While listening to Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (Cardiff 1999) on a lunchtime excursion to Whitechapel in East London and playing with the ball as a response to the dialogue, I identified different interactions a ball could enable, including bouncing, spinning, rolling, returning, leaving and proximity-based actions.

A video prototype explored imaginative scenarios in a local park, combining ball interactions with digital graphics and staged interviews to explore potential user experiences.

However, the experiment highlighted that focusing on an interface risked reducing what could be a playful embodied encounter into a set of simple sequential problem-solving interactions. Which gesture, action, location will play the next part of the story? The video, created for an audience that did not exist, emphasised the disembodied qualities of representing, and using my body, as a prop in a visual storyboard.

This experiment was never intended to result in a piece of technology, rather its purpose was to gain a first-hand understanding of how the body might engage with a story. The exercise demonstrated that physically acting out scenarios through my body, then reflecting and documenting them, provided valuable embodied insight and reinforced the need to engage with my body directly as a material of design practice.