TALK 8 September 2015 11.00 - IDSIA meeting room Action space of digital devices Isabella Loddo, Design Science at Iuav University of Venice, Italy Abstract The action space of digital devices defines a social interaction space, that needs to be recognized and understood in order to be inhabited. As well as we shape spaces that prepare to social interaction, technologies can invite the body to assume specific behaviors. The dimensions of the social and the tangible, in fact, are new approaches that have in common an embodied view of interactions. Our body is a communication machine, which sends and receives stimuli, not only biological but also physical, cognitive and emotional: we are open to the world and we are in balance on it. There are different forms of balance that the body undertakes as different environmental situations that create an alteration and a reaction that restores a new stability. The goal of my research is to offer demonstrations, objects and views that are relevant to assessing physical interfaces with a generalized method, heterogeneous content can be validated with a critical methodology and evaluation of the artifacts. My talk will concern the representation of motion, the evaluation of the user experience, the mapping of interactions and the exploration of human motion acquisition tools, to investigate whether the methodology of using notations [e.g. the Labanotation] can exhaustively express the tertiary qualities and the invisible spaces of interaction. The aim, in perspective, is to shift from the evaluation of human-todevice interactions to the study of social interactions in spaces that are shaped by technology. In this sense, robotics can both provide us with models to represent gestural actions, in order to reduce them into their basic components, as well as devices to be controlled through this kind of interfaces, defining a correspondency between gestural actions and behaviors of the robot/device. In other words, there are both a component of decoding human motion and the necessity for a good translation of these movements into interfaces. Isabella Loddo is a PhD candidate in Design Science at Iuav University of Venice, Italy. Her research area is tangible interaction design, specifically embodied interfaces and their semantics. Her approach is finding balance in complexity and she applies it into research in the field of robotics and bio-medicine. She is currently involved in the IBIS group with ASI (Italian Space Agency).