Returning to the dance floor after a long period of time gave me the opportunity to observe movement from a different perspective. As a designer, it occurred to me that design as a discipline shares principles and elements with dance. This observation though not necessarily original, it is not often considered, if at all. In graduate school, some of my professors looked at me with inquisitive skepticism enveloped in kindness. It puzzled me because it was glaringly obvious to me.
I grew up with movement. My culture is a culture of music and dancing. Though not everyone will dance, almost everyone will play music very loudly for practically everything: get togethers, cleaning day, car cleaning, shopping, driving, etc.. The times when there is not music are few and far between. With music comes movement. Families get up to dance with each other, people dance in the street, and even hotel lobbies will sometimes or often feature live music where people gather, enjoy some drinks, and dance. My mother’s side of the family had dancers and musicians. My grandfather was dancing pretty close to the end of his life.
Perhaps it was easy to me to see the movement as a design language because I grew up familiar with it. Or perhaps I was simply learning something that opened my eyes to other possibilities. Either way, movement is not a novel concept. We move. And with each movement we communicate something. In fact, we communicate a lot.
Today I went to have dinner at an Indian restaurant with my family. The restaurant has three or four TVs showing an assortment of Bollywood films. Usually the films do not have much dialogue. In contrast, they do have an abundance of movement, gestures, and dances. The story is told through the movement. Today in particular, I noticed that there was some dialogue in their language with captions. But, I did not need to understand. The movement told the story and I caught the gist of it.
Parallel to my experience in the restaurant, this morning when while singing hymns, I found myself reading the notes. I can read a little music. It made me think of how a simple language system can encode our words in a harmony and a melody. I found it beautiful that this system of notation allows to encode sounds to make music.
Most of us do not think about movement in the same way we think about music: a language. These days I do not dance as often as I used to. I still observe movement as a tool that communicates beyond our words. Just like music changes according to context and purpose so does movement. Movement can sometimes betray our words. We think we are saying something and our movements and gestures say something else. The book Beyond Words by Carol-Lynn Moore and Kauro Yamamoto propose three frameworks in which we understand movement as language: universal, foreign, and private. I explain further in my thesis document but for our purposes, let’s just define them this way:
Universal: the general understanding of movement. Everyone moves and we are capable of identify that a walk is a walk, for instance.
Foreign: involves factors such as culture and context. A great part of our moment is culture specific. The way a person walks, the time and way a person walks, the side of the sidewalk a person walks on, and many others can be a function of cultural norms.
Private: the movement understood in relationships such as close friendships, family, and romantic relationships.
These frameworks have one thing in common: movement as a visual language. It is something we see and because of what and how we see it, we extract meaning from it. As a visual language there has historically been different attempts to create a system similar to music notation. It wasn’t until dance theorist, Rudolph Laban created the system known as Labanotation that a notation system stuck. Ann Hutchinson Guest, who is the authority in the subject has written extensively both about the attempts before Labanotation and about Labanotation itself.
Movement as a visual language has not only been explored in a notation system. It has also been explored as image in the fine arts and in the design field. Wassily Kandinsky for instance, developed an abstracted language based on dancers. In another example, in the work of Jennifer Sterling movement is more than image, it is itself the essence of her work—whether it is digital or analog.
I have often wondered if there is a relationship between how we move and our design work. Are people who move carefully less daring and risk takers in their work? Are those who move assertively more daring in their design decision making? How does movement affect our design output, if it does? Do we see ourselves as elements of visual communication in our space? I have been thinking about these questions lately…
Until next week,
Alma