Wearable Choreographer: Designing Soft Robotics for Dance Practice

In this pictorial, we describe an auto-biographical design process that led to the fabrication of a soft robotic wearable for lower limb movement guidance that we designated Wearable Choreographer. We first explored the design from a first-person perspective and then shared it with four dancers. Our experiments illustrate how the wearable both constrains and inspires the dancers towards new ways of performing, challenging them to rethink their movements. Our design inquiry contributes with reflections on soft robotics that uncover the challenges and prospects designers and researchers in Human-Computer Interaction face when designing, prototyping and experimenting with such technologies for embodied interactions.