DESIGNING MOVEMENT: An Aesthetic Investigation of Motion in Product Design
The Language of Movement:
In other fields of human endeavor—such as dance, physics, or puppetry—the language of movement has been evolving for thousands of years. Choreography, for example, is singularly devoted to animating dancers’ bodies in new and interesting ways to communicate ideas. There are different systems of abstract, graphic notation that have been developed to record the complex mechanics of dance.
Similarly, physics originally developed its kinetic computations in order to better hurl rocks at enemy battlements…and it is now used to map space-time. Likewise, through attention to the poetics of movement, puppetry has evolved from medieval marionettes to the magic of Hollywood animatronics. Design, by contrast, can only muster the Walkman.
What choreographers, physicists, and puppeteers have in common is that they are all able to sketch movements, record their ideas, and talk about them. Design has no such tradition of kinetic notation or vocabulary. While design has many resources with which to address form, surface, and structure, it has no means of effectively developing or recording a spatial event that takes place over time. In other words, the discipline of Design has no tradition, methods, or language for designing movement.