We've all seen it: the teenagers with one earbud in, feigning interest in conversation; iPad users brandishing the device like a radiation barrier to snap a photo; the veritable hypnosis of the "cell trance." In fact, maybe you're reading these very words on your smartphone, killing time in line while you wait for the next express train or your double-shot skinny latte. No shame in that—we all do it.
These behaviors and over 20 other digital gestures are duly catalogued in a research project conducted at the Art Center College of Design by Nicolas Nova, Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon and Walton Chiu, in July and August of last year. The four published their findings on our gadget-enabled society in an ongoing blog and a book [PDF] as of last September. "Curious Rituals" is nothing short of brilliant, a comprehensive index of the gestures, tics and related epiphenomena organized into seven categories of vaguely anthropological rigor. (The authors also extrapolated their findings in a short film of several hypothetical not-so-distant future scenarios, which I found rather less compelling than the book.)
While the blog illustrates their process—along with related videos and imagery—the final report, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License, offers an incisive examination of "gestures, postures and digital rituals that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies."
Regarding digital technologies, [this endeavor shows] how the use of such devices is a joint construction between designers and users. Some of the gestures we describe here indeed emerged from people's everyday practices, either from a naïve perspective (lifting up one's finger in a cell phone conversation to have better signal) or because they're simply more practical (watching a movie in bed with the laptop shifted). Even the ones that have been "created" by designers (pinching, taps, swipes, clicks) did not come out from the blue; they have been transferred from existing habits using other objects. The description of these postures, gestures and rituals can then be seen as a way to reveal the way users domesticate new technologies.
Dan Hill of City of Sound sets the stage with a number of own observations in his fluent introductory essay. The designer/urbanist/technologist sets the stage by taking a casual inventory of gestures from the "wake-up wiggle" (impatiently jostling a mouse to awaken a sleeping computer) to iPad photography (which "feels awkward and transitional") and instant-classic iPhone compass calibrator (later referred to as the "angry monkey"). I'd add that this last gesture looks something like twirling an invisible baton or fire dancing—or, incidentally, 'skippable rope' from Art Hack Day.
