CBreath: Co-Design a Collaborative Breathing Experience to Create Interpersonal Connectedness

Abstract

The need for interpersonal connectedness and the possibility of applying collaborative breathing in technological artifacts for mediating connectedness has led to the idea of devising an experience that applies internal, physiological synchronization aided by technology to create connectedness. The aim of this research is to explore how to use co-design to help understand jam session performers’ insights on their expected sensory experiences related to interpersonal connectedness and how to devise technological artifacts to meet their needs to establish internal connectedness with each other. In this re search-led design project, an iteration model of a series of speculative co-design workshops, prototyping and testing was proposed and applied based on the concept of co-design. The design outcome — CBreath — presents a way of using collaborative breathing to create connectedness between the performers, externalizing their synchronized breathing by multi-sensory experiences via light, wind, and dynamic objects and making such effects parts of the jam session. This research demonstrates the feasibility of incorporating the iterative speculative co-design model into experience-oriented design of technology to ethically design for interpersonal connectedness. Such a design research approach can be further improved and applied in future technological artifact development to prioritize people’s expected experiences of establishing interpersonal connectedness in different contexts.