Interactive Sports Technologies

Performance, Participation, Safety

Veronika Tzankova, Michael Filimowicz, Veronika Tzankova, Michael Filimowicz

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000592306
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Technology & Engineering
• Categoría: Engineering General

Building on the unfolding and expanding embeddedness of digital technologies in all aspects of life, Interactive Sports Technologies: Performance, Participation, Safety focuses on the intersection of body movement, physical awareness, engineering, design, software, and hardware to capture emerging trends for enhancing sports and athletic activities. The accessible and inspiring compilation of theoretical, critical, and phenomenological approaches utilizes the domain of sports to extend our understanding of the nexus between somatic knowledge and human-computer interaction in general. Within this framework, the chapters in this volume draw upon a variety of concepts, processes, practices, and elucidative examples to bring together a timely assessment of interactive technologies' potential to facilitate increased performance, participation, and safety in sports.

This collection of chapters from international authors presents diverse perspectives from a wide range of academic and practice-based researchers within a comprehensive coverage of sport disciplines.

1 Introduction: A Comprehensive Approach to Interactive Sports Technologies

Veronika Tzankova and Michael Filimowicz

DOI: 10.4324/9781003205111-1

1.1 Introduction

Despite the widespread interest in digital and interactive technologies for exercise and movement—as evidenced by a variety of commercial products, patents, and publications—there is a surprising absence of methodically organized academic research on the use of interactive technologies within sports and sports-related activities. Given that sports are one of the most accessible form of systematized human movement, paired with the continuously increasing ubiquity of computation within everyday life, the goal of Interactive Sports Technologies is to outline the thematic and practical issues underlying the relationship between computing, human-computer interaction (HCI), embodiment, movement + athletic skill, and interactive technologies for sports. Specifically, the anthology takes into account the continuously expanding horizons of HCI to situate the research, methodologies, design, utilization, and experience of interactive technologies as central to the acquisition of somatic knowledge, awareness, feel, perception, self-imaging, and motivation—among others—directed toward increased athletic performance in sports. At the same time, it is also designed as an exploration into the alternative possibilities that fuse the productive and imaginative potential of embodied-sports practices with HCI research and digital technologies. It intends to provide a context, inspiration, and structure to facilitate new forms of inquiry into the emergent domain of interactive sports technologies (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Explorations at the verge of movement expertise, HCI, and interactive technologies for sports.

At the same time, it is also designed as an exploration into the alternative possibilities that fuse the productive and imaginative potential of embodied-sports practices with HCI research and interactive technologies. It intends to provide context, inspiration, and structure to facilitate new forms of inquiry into the emergent domain of interactive sports technologies.

1.2 The Challenges Surrounding the Research + Design of Interactive Sports Technologies

One of the primary challenges surrounding the research and design of interactive sports technologies has been the identification of a ‘common ground’ that most efficiently captures the complexity and totality of relations involved in these. The range of thematic domains implicated are numerous, including HCI, embodiment theory + practice, athletic skill development, research methodologies, design approaches, data implementation, and the varying specifics of sport disciplines. Taken individually, each of these thematic domains comes associated with a wide range of practical, conceptual, and methodological traditions. When viewed in aggregate, the challenge becomes identifying points of departure that collectively plot the details and nuances formed by the intricate interactions and interrelations of the aforementioned fields without trivializing the variations that may emerge from adopting a specific perspective.

Currently, a substantial part of the research into interactive sports technologies comes from the field of HCI. A review of the available literature within this domain reveals several thematic tensions that condition ‘unilateral’ approaches which inform the theory and practice of these. Although such approaches address and solve many practical problems, they limit the possibilities of expanding and reimagining the potential of interactive technologies for sports. Drawing on the historical influences, values, and assumptions that drive the field of interactive sports technologies within HCI, we have identified three main thematic tensions that we discuss in detail in the following sections of this introductory chapter: (1) between efficiency and capacity for experience; (2) mind-body dualism; and (3) goal-oriented vs. altruistic enframings of technology.

1.2.1 Between Efficiency and Capacity for Experience

The introduction of embodiment theory and practice to the domain of HCI has created significant opportunities for rethinking the role technologies play in our lives. The intellectual tradition associated with the study of technology has emphasized that technology tends to operate by its own inherent logic of efficiency (see e.g. Ellul, 1973; Feenberg, 2010; Heidegger, 1996; Marx & Engels, 1983). Technology becomes a product of its function stripped bare of social contexts or cultural meanings. The function of technology dictates its trajectory of development where the logic of efficiency serves as a basis for identifying that trajectory. Thus, technologies are inherently subordinated and operate by the logic of efficiency. Efficiency is, as Heidegger (1996) suggests, an aspiration to control nature and being in itself.

Although philosophers of technology have situated efficiency more as a theoretical construct that helps explain the immanent striving for technological progress in the face of environmental and social catastrophes, we can trace its practical dimension reflected in the first and second wave HCI. The first wave HCI “was concerned with engineering systems to make people working with machines more effective” (Cairns & Power, 2018, p. 61), where the second wave extended on the human-technology nexus to involve collaborative, mediated, and distributed applications within work settings (Bødker, 2015). Both of these waves reflect on the preoccupation with assisting people to be faster and make fewer mistakes—an overt example of the practical modality of efficiency. Third wave HCI, with its strong focus on experience, has transformed the essence of human-computer interaction to engage with values, meaning-making, and situated knowledge (ibid). Body-based approaches to interactive technology design fall into the third wave and seem to have further emphasized the importance of lived experiences and felt senses to technological mediation. We can say that third wave HCI shifted—at least partially—the perceived purpose of technology from efficiency to facilitation of experience. Based on this trajectory of development, we can argue that the design and configuration of contemporary technologies should do more than merely accomplish our ends; through enhancing a space for reflection, technologies carry the potential to remind us of the ameliorative experiential properties of meaningful relations with both ourselves and the world outside us.

Where approaching the design of interactive technologies with a specific focus on lived experiences has already been implemented (see e.g. Antle et al., 2011; Cairns & Power, 2018; Hallnäs & Redström, 2001), the domain of interactive sports technologies seems to predominantly be operating under the presumption of efficiency (Nylander et al., 2014). This forms a thematic tension, where athletic skills are treated as a measurable performance outcome without consideration of non-measurable somatic self-mastery and “skills of experience” (Loke & Schiphorst, 2018, para. 4) which are in many cases essential to athletic operations.

We are currently experiencing a new wave of digital transformation, where smart materials, autonomous technologies, and ubiquitous systems shift the way in which we navigate through our lives and experiences. Kristina Höök argues that these changes present a significant opportunity to reimagine “the way we interact with the inanimate world” (2018, p. 2), where designing engaging interactions with technologies is important. The design of engaging interactions heavily depends on establishing a positive flow of experience between the soma and the technology where somaesthetic sensibilities are essential and should be given substantial consideration. Reimagining the potential of interactive sports technologies can help us extend on Höök's insight by considering the ways in which accounting for somaesthetic sensibilities in technology [design + interaction + application] can mediate our relations not only with the inanimate world, but also our relations with ourselves and the rest of the animate world.

This insight appeared to the first author of this chapter during one of her horseback riding sessions. She recollects:

My horse seemed to object to everything I did. Although I was closely following the instructions of my trainer, I was consistently failing to establish a positive relational flow with my equine partner. At some point, my trainer made a remark that stuck with me for its insightful simplicity. She said: “Maybe you should first learn to control yourself before attempting to influence anything else.” The trainer's remark made me shift attention from my horse (and the way he was doing everything ‘wrong’) to myself, and my own state of body/mind. This attentional shift fixed all problems.

Without realizing it, the trainer got engaged in the centuries-long philosophical quest for self-mastery, which has been an integral part of ethics and aesthetics in their pursuit of Socrates’ question “What is a good life?” The art of equitation—where self-mastery establishes the ‘ground zero’—is the perfect example of how “the joys and simulations of so-called pure thought are (for us embodied humans) influenced by somatic conditioning”(Shusterman, 2008, p. 21). Sometimes we need external input to navigate our state of body/mind in the right direction and emphasize our somatic potentials. Often such input comes from humans, but this is not a necessity. We can create technologies that support ameliorative shifts of attention, stimulate somatic awareness, and assist the users to reflect on themselves.

As an equestrian rider, Höök has also observed the parallels between human-horse coupling and human-machine coupling. In her article Transferring Qualities from Horseback Riding to Design (2010), Höök synthesizes the lessons extracted from learning horseback riding—specifically, awareness of body balance, weight, muscle memory, flow and rhythm of movement and how such lessons can be transferred to design principles. Höök suggests that these can be utilized by treating (full-) body movement as (1) wordless signs and signals; (2) bodily learning; and (3) aesthetic experiences through rhythm. The unification of different agents within the construction of an assembly or a closed system through non-verbal communication is similar to treating human-computer coupling as a synergetic, co-evolving relation. The aesthetic experience is created in the vitality of flow as an all-absorbing state. Movement (riding in this case) can facilitate aesthetic experiences and a certain quality of interaction as rhythm is often essential to body functions & movements (heartbeat and breathing, for example). Rhythm can make the “interaction come alive” (ibid, p. 234).

Höök's article corresponds to the emergent consideration of somatics practices in HCI. Somatics is defined as “the field which studies the soma: namely the body as perceived from within by first-person perception” (Hanna, 1986, p. 4). Richard Shusterman (2008) extends on the conceptualization of the ‘soma’ to develop a systematic philosophical framework called somaesthetics. Somaesthetics is concerned with “the critical study and meliorative cultivation of how we experience and use the living body (or soma) as a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning” (ibid, p.19). Somaesthetics has since been adapted into the field of HCI as an experience-centered approach for exploring the aesthetic dimensions of interaction and improving designers’ sensibilities of haptic, dynamic, and non-material qualities of movement. Current adaptations of somaesthetics in HCI predominantly focus on borrowing its theoretical instruments to explain human movement, where somaesthetics’ pragmatic and practical branches—developing specific methods for somatic improvement and actual implementation of somatic improvement, respectively—have so far been overlooked (Lee et al., 2014).

Nevertheless, the turn to experience (Dourish, 2001) in HCI along with a systematic rediscovery of the body as a place of knowledge production (Varela et al., 1991) and aesthetic appreciation (Dewey, 1997; Shusterman, 2008) in the Western intellectual tradition have triggered the reconsideration of the historically-dominant understanding of human-technology relations. The...