ble entity. In these situations, the results can reach
levels beyond all expectations.
In dance or musical improvisation - autotelic ex-
periences by essence - the goal is in the exploration
rather than the completion. Each participant will pro-
pose, receive, then propose again, thus unfolding the
course of the shared experience, in a balance between
tensions and harmonies. These events involve com-
plex interaction strategies between the participants,
involving many expressive, perceptive, contextual and
emotional parameters. The principles of mirror neu-
rons, or empathy, resonate closely with these dynam-
ics of coordination and affective tuning.
The desired goal is by no means discrete but mul-
tiple, it is at the same time an exploration of one’s
body, one’s instrument, and at the same time to push
one’s own limits, to set oneself a challenge, for him as
for others; it is at the same time A game, a surprise,
it can be humorous, as it can be infuriating, violent or
passionate.
A successful improvisation performance does not
lie in the fulfillment of a predefined goal, but in the
quality and renewal of the ideas proposed, their ap-
propriateness to the context, and of course in the plea-
sure felt and the emotion shared with the partners and
the viewers.
3 FLOW IN AN INTERFACE
3.1 Aim of the Study
The argument of this article is to propose design
guidelines favoring the exploration and appropriation
of an interface by a novice user, by drawing inspi-
ration from the mechanisms of adaptation and per-
ceptive loops in improvisation activities. We want
to create sensitive digital experiences, accessible to
as many people as possible, and dynamically adapt
their behavior and their interface to the activity and
to the emotional state of the users. Our hypothesis is
that such a design would favor the emergence of Flow
states, leading to the setting up of a ”social contract”
between the user and his interface (Bianchini et al.,
2015).
A central idea in any form of improvisation is the
tuning and good communication between the individ-
uals involved. In the context of an interactive experi-
ence, the emergence of a participant’s feeling of free-
dom requires that his power and his grip over it are
clear, and that the effects produced are immediately
perceived. To base our interactional paradigm we can
not ask the human to express themselves in the native
language of the machine, but we can instead draw in-
spiration from inter-human modes of communication.
Empathic phenomena work by identification, by
projecting oneself into the body of another. We must
be able to translate all the information coming from
the user to the machine, to reveal his ease and emo-
tional state so that the interface can adapt to it.
This proposal and this entire research focus there-
fore on the expressive dynamics that can be envisaged
between the user and the system. Coordination in cre-
ative improvisation is the result of multiple adapta-
tions based on the entire perceptual and cognitive do-
main; drawing inspiration from it for an interface de-
sign implies to determine which information can be
observed from the user and how it can be reflected
with an adaptation from the interface.
We will detail what implies the idea of a coordi-
nated interaction for the user and the machine.
3.2 Adapt to the User – Movement
Qualities
We want to give the user the feeling of being under-
stood by the system, to give him the will to propose
and improvise through it, to explore it freely and to
bond a new and personal form of exchange. We need
therefore to identify what we can track to design our
adaptive and pseudo-empathic process.
Many models exist for the evaluation of a user in a
digital context. These models list a certain number of
criteria specific to the cognitive, physical, psycholog-
ical and emotional domains. For our research we seek
to identify the characteristics that have an influence on
the phenomena of emotional and empathic contagion.
Further explorations will be conducted on the actual
characteristics during a co-creative activity with the
ArTiculations project. In this study, two participants
will interact in a virtual reality experience via a sim-
plified representation of their movements. We want
to analyse quantitatively the observed behaviours and
collect the emotionnal outlines of their experiences
(see 4.2.2).
In Figure 2, some characteristics are distinguished
through several temporalities. Some will remain fixed
from one session to another (the gender, the physical
characteristics ...), others can change radically as the
experience is lived (the emotional state, the cognitive
load ...). For reasons of comfort and portability we
do not want to equip the users with sensors, or asking
them to fill questionnaires beforehand.
We will build our analysis engine on the basis of
the clues collected during the actual experience, and
centered on the core of our proposal: the expressive
and intuitive potential of the gesture.
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