P is for Proprioception
If you’ve ever been stopped by a cop who’s suspicious that you’re DUI, you know that you have to close your eyes, spread your arms and touch your nose. Your ability to do this sobering feat is due to your sense of proprioception. Essentially, proprioception is your extended sense of self. Your ability to know where all of your body parts are in space, their relationship to each other, and surrounding objects. So when you type without looking, that’s proprioception. Reach for a glass of water while reading, that’s proprioception. What’s interesting today is that designers of experiences are manipulating this seemingly unknown sense in a variety of ways as research shows that our body map is surprisingly flexible if there is a tight coupling between what we see and what we feel. For instance, architect Lars Spuybroek, who states that feeling not only constructs space but our movement through space, designed a liquid environment called Water Pavilion in which there was no distinction between horizontal and vertical, no angle was square, and localized and group movements cued sensorial projections triggering a constant, inescapable out-of-balance experience. For artist-writer team, Arakawa + Gins, proprioception is the key for living forever, and has driven them to design playground living spaces in Japan that force the body to maneuver through slopes and bumps believing that if a person keeps alert and awakens instincts, death is impossible. And artist Hiro Yamagata, known for his dynamic use of light, created a disco game of holograms in his installation NGC6093 with the sole purpose of disorientating one’s sense of balance so that they may realize consciousness is highly inaccurate. As technology wii-fits forward with haptics that serve to re-invent our mobile devices so that we can actually be “mobile” and continue to concentrate on the real world, and gesture-recognition games like Mirror’s Edge advance so that we can truly become one with our avatar, it’s apparent that this malleable sense will provide us with new perceptions of ourselves and our world—even if we’ve fallen and we can’t get up. (LOL)