Jaana Parviainen

Leadership and bodily knowledge in expert organizations:: epistemological rethinking

This paper argues that leadership knowledge has a bodily dimension, especially in expert organizations. Different knowledge types in leadership research are analysed and discussed on a basis of two dimensions: the nature of knowledge (tacit and explicit) and the knowledge actors (individual and collective). Bodily leadership knowledge refers to a special type of tacit knowing acquired through experience and social interaction over time. It is concluded that sensitive leadership and shared leadership describe individual and collective tacit leadership knowledge types, in which personal bodies have a central role in knowledge development. The paper suggests, among other things, that the bodily presence and distance of leaders are paradoxical elements in the leadership of expert organizations.

The standardization process of movement in the fitness industry: The experience design of Les Mills choreographies

This article explores processes of standardizing movement in the fitness industry, using the Les Mills Fitness programmes as a case study. With licensees in 70 countries, the company has gained widespread recognition as the world’s biggest producer of branded fitness classes. Based on participant observation in fitness classes, the article examines what kind of intangible touchpoints are hidden in the fitness services to make them attractive to clients. While the global delivery system of fitness services aims at transcending the body, the phenomenological description of the lived body becomes a key factor in revealing the nature of standardization. Outlining fitness products as experience design, the purpose is to reach behind the managerial rhetoric. Reflecting on the global delivery system of fitness services and its effects on interaction between instructors and fitness clients, the article analyses how the global industry of fitness services standardizes bodily movements to make profit from them.

Choreographing Resistances: Spatial- Kinaesthetic Intelligence and Bodily Knowledge as Political Tools in Activist Work

Abstract Bodies have been used as a political tool in activism, but many scholars have ignored activists’ highly sophisticated and intelligent ways of using their moving bodies. This paper focuses on analysing three choreographies of resistance: the group crawling performance for striking nurses in Helsinki in 2007, the protest by Greenpeace at a nuclear construction site in 2007 and a protest in the 1989 Chinese student movement. The purpose is to shed light on how resisting choreographies can generate interactions and relations between agents keeping these interactions dynamic by the motivations and affections of these agents. I will apply Edmund Husserl’s and Edith Stein’s phenomenological method of analysing movement and their notion of kinaesthesia. One of the keywords here is ‘the kinaesthetic field’ that offers a new perspective to account for resisting choreography and its dynamics in socially, politically and emotionally complex environments. Drawing on Howard Gardner’s notion of kinaesthetic intelligence, I suggest that the core element of kinaesthetic intelligence is not only control of one’s bodily motion but also capabilities for working with kinaesthetic fields. The paper argues that the activists can operate gestures, the vulnerability of the body and timing by drawing various agents into their choreography. When activists are able to express their political ideas as concrete gestures, postures or kinaesthetic relations, it also supports their capabilities of articulating their moral intuitions. Even when witnesses disagree with protesters’ positions, protests frequently force them to reconsider their own.

Creating Immersive Audio and Lighting Based Physical Exercise Games for Schoolchildren

We have created story-based exercise games utilizing light and sound to encourage children to participate in physical exercise in schools. Our reasonably priced technological setup provides practical and expressive means for creating immersive and rich experiences to support physical exercise education in schools. Studies conducted in schools showed that the story and drama elements draw children into the world of the exercise game. Moreover, children who do not like traditional games and exercises engaged in these activities. Our experiences also suggest that childrens imagination plays a great role in the design and engagement into exercise games, which makes co-creation with children a viable and exciting approach to creating new games.

Dwelling in the Virtual Sonic Environment: A Phenomenological Analysis of Dancers’ Learning Processes

This article discusses the Embodied Generative Music (EGM) project carried out at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics IEM in Austria. In investigating a new interface that combines motion capture and sound processing software with movement improvisation and performance, I focus on dancers’ learning processes of dwelling in the virtual sonic environment. Applying phenomenology and its concepts, I describe how dancers explore reversibility of sound and movement to shape this connection in an artistically expressive manner. The article proposes that dancers build bodily knowledge through both the sonic environment and their own passive and active, intuitive and deliberate, movement choices. While dwelling in a digital environment changes dancers’ habitual manners of behaving, it opens up to them new kinds of kinaesthetic opportunities of intimacy and pleasure in motion. The findings from this research reveal the importance of bodily interaction with virtual environments in developing new movement-based interfaces.

Bodily knowledge beyond motor skills and physical fitness: a phenomenological description of knowledge formation in physical training

Bodily knowledge has attracted significant attention within the humanities and other related fields over the last two decades. Although theoretical discussion on bodily knowledge in the context of physical education has been active over the past 10 years, these discussions lack clear conceptual analyses of bodily knowledge. Using a phenomenological approach, the purpose of this paper is to clarify the notion of bodily knowledge, furthering epistemological discussions of the topic within reflective, embodied practices. Instead of seeing bodily knowledge inherently connected to the acquisition of motor skills or improving physical fitness, we will discuss physical training as a reflective, embodied process that can turn sensuous information about the moving body into knowledge. Using outdoor running as an example, we describe the process of forming bodily knowledge, which includes: (1) the exploring and identifying of movement qualities, (2) developing capabilities of registering changes in the body and (3) directing and modifying ones own training processes based on bodily findings. Contextualizing this epistemological discussion with adults’ recreational physical activity, this paper argues that bodily knowledge can cultivate individuals to trust their own body awareness and embodied responses to take more responsibility for their own physical exercise. When biomedical knowledge of the body in sport sciences tends to shrink the body to physiological attributes, such as muscle mass and fat percentage, our analysis stresses the agency of the lived body as a source of knowledge in physical activity.

Schoolchildren’s user experiences on a physical exercise game utilizing lighting and audio

Abstract Motivated by the troubling news on decreased exercise amount and increased obesity among children and adolescents, we investigated the possibilities of interactive lighting technology in encouraging children to participate in physical exercise in schools. We have created a story-driven physical exercise game based on light and sound utilizing a reasonably priced technological setup. The game has been evaluated with several groups of schoolchildren during physical education classes. The results show that a physical exercise game enhanced with lighting and audio keeps schoolchildren motivated both mentally and physically even after several playtimes. In subjective evaluations, participants still found the story of the game interesting after three playtimes, and were eager to exercise this way again.

Symmetry as a Mechanism of Control in Management

This paper explores the role of symmetry in conceptualising organisations and management. Symmetry is here defined as a correct proportion of the parts in a composition, those parts being either physical or conceptual. We present two cases of symmetry in management practices to demonstrate how symmetry as a combination of aesthetics and cognition can turn into a mechanism of control. First, we analyse the bilateral symmetry of an organisation chart of a Finnish forest company. We then read the visual symmetry of one strategy model and show how its “visual order” takes over conceptual exactness. We argue that symmetry can be a powerful control mechanism which managers apply to construct a desirable image of their organisation.

Who Controls Who? Embodied Control Within Human–Technology Choreographies

In this paper, we explore issues of embodied control that relate to current and future technologies in which body movements function as an instrument of control. Instead of just seeing ourselves in control, it is time to consider how these technologies actually control our moving bodies and transform our lived spaces. By shifting the focus from devices to choreographies among devices, we perform a theoretical analysis of the multidimensional aspects that reside within embodied interaction with technology. We suggest that it is beneficial to acknowledge and reformulate the phenomena of embodied control that go beyond the instrumental user-todevice control scheme. Drawing upon the phenomenology of the body, ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science, we identify three different dimensions of embodied control: instrumental, experiential and infrastructural. Design implications of this theoretical model are also discussed.

Human-technology choreographies: re-thinking body, movement and space in interaction design

Bodily movements have traditionally had mostly instrumental value in interaction design. However, movements can also be given a central role in understanding behaviour and in designing technology for humans. This workshop is aiming at taking a fresh, movement-oriented look at the design and evaluation of technology in a wide variety of contexts.