Returning to the dance floor after a long period gave me the opportunity to observe movement from a different perspective. Design, as a discipline, shares principles and elements with dance. Though this observation is not necessarily original, it is not often considered, if at all. In graduate school, some professors looked at me with inquisitive skepticism enveloped in kindness. It puzzled me because this parallel was glaringly obvious to me.
I grew up with movement. My culture is a culture of music and dancing. Though not everyone dances, almost everyone plays music very loudly for practically everything: get-togethers, cleaning day, car cleaning, shopping, driving, etc. The times without 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 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 danced to the end of his life.
Perhaps it was easy for me to see movement as a design language because I grew up with it. Or maybe I was 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.
Recently, I had dinner with my family at an Indian restaurant. The restaurant had three or four TVs showing an assortment of Bollywood films. Usually, the films have little dialogue. In contrast, they have abundant movement, gestures, and dances. The stories are told through movement. The captions had some dialogue, but I didn’t need those to understand. The movement told the story, and I caught the gist of it.
Parallel to my experience in the restaurant, I found myself reading the musical notes while singing hymns. It made me think of how a simple language system can encode our words in harmony and melody. I found it beautiful that this notation system allows us 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, yet our gestures say something else. The book Beyond Words by Carol-Lynn Moore and Kauro Yamamoto proposes three frameworks in which we understand movement as language: universal, foreign, and private. I explain further in my thesis, but for our purposes, let’s define them this way:
Universal is the general understanding of movement. Everyone moves, and we can identify that a walk is a walk, for instance.
Foreign involves factors such as culture and context. A great part of our movement is culture-specific. Cultural norms can affect how a person walks, the speed at which a person walks, the side of the sidewalk a person walks on, and many other aspects of one’s behavior.
Private is 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 we extract meaning from it because of what and how we see it. As a visual language, there have been historical 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, an authority on the subject, has written extensively about the attempts before Labanotation and about Labanotation itself.
Movement as a visual language has not only been explored in notation systems. It has also been explored as image in the fine arts and in the design field. Wassily Kandinsky, for instance, developed an abstract language based on dancers. In another example, in Jennifer Sterling’s work, movement is more than image; it is the essence of her work—whether digital or analog.
I have often wondered if there is a relationship between how we move and our design work. Do people who move carefully take fewer risks in their work? Are those who move assertively more daring in their design decision-making? How does movement affect our design output? Do we see ourselves as elements of visual communication in the space we occupy? I have been thinking about these questions lately.
Alma Hoffmann is a freelance designer, design educator, author of Sketching as Design Thinking, and editor at Smashing Magazine. This is an edited version of an original post on Temperamental amusing shenanigans, Alma’s Substack dedicated to design, life, and everything in between.
Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash.