Engagement Space: The Body in Parallel and Sequential Time and Space
Satinder P. Gill
satinderg@acm.org, http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~sgill/

Abstract

The engagement space is a space of communication, within which rhythmic coordinations, called Body Moves, occur to maintain, form and re-form it. In this paper, we consider the relation of this space to Kendon’s (1990) formative study of bodily orientations in the F-formation system that serve to sustain and maintain it. The analysis of one particular Body Move, the Parallel Coordinated Move, suggests a difference in the idea of ‘overlap’ between the two spatial theories. In the F-formation system, overlap occurs in the shift from individual to shared space, as a necessary configuration. In the Engagement Space, overlap evolves as a shift from action-response motions, to simultaneous motions, both taking place in shared space. Within this overlap, found in parallel coordinated action, we find coordinated autonomy and suggest that autonomy is a function of ‘overlap’ in human collaborative or joint action.

Introduction: Body Moves and Engagement

The study of Body Moves and the Engagement Space has emerged as part of the author’s research on knowledge flow and formation in interactive design and use of interfaces. The engagement space is shaped by Body Moves. These are a form of metacommunication, serving ‘to instruct about or alter the ongoing communicational process’ (Scheflen, 1974). Body Moves are rhythmic configurations between persons. They are a form of rhythmic synchrony (Birdwhistle, 1979). Each Body Move is a composite of rhythm of more than one person. In developing this aspect, we drew upon the idea of the composite signal of Clark (1996) and Engle (1998), and conceived of Body Moves as Composite Dialogue Acts. These are formed of various combinations of gesture, speech, and silence. Bateson (1955) said of the relation between kinesics and language, that the ‘movement of the body helps in clarifying meaning by supplementing features of the structure of language’. Body Moves do just this within their composite matrix of body, speech and silence.
Two kinds of Body Moves, having sequential and parallel structures, have been identified and analysed within the engagement space. Sequential Body Moves have the structure of action-reaction motion, whilst Parallel Coordinated Moves have the structure of parallel motion (Gill, Kawamori, Katagiri, Shimojima, 2000; Gill, 2001; Gill, 2002; Gill and Borchers, 2003; Gill, 2003a; Gill, 2003b). They have different priorities in their functionality. Sequential moves serve to maintain the communication, whilst parallel moves serve to transform the communication. There is a pulsation in the movement from sequential to parallel action that facilitates the process of grounding.


The Engagement Space

As communication opens between persons, their bodies indicate and signal a willingness to cooperate. This indication of commitment to be with each other, and attitude, sets the engagement space. Each person has a body field of engagement, and together, the aggregate of their fields, forms the engagement space. This is therefore also called, the Body Field of Engagement. It is a variable field and alters with the degrees of comfort and discomfort, expressed in our work as ‘contact’, within the communicative space. In order to handle factors such as attitude, commitment, and feeling sensations such as contact, we found Allwood’s theory of communicative acts (1991) to be invaluable, as he provides a system for how participants signal and indicate their orientation towards each other, and we modified it for analysis of the body in communication.

The F-formation System

Kendon’s F-formation system (1990) was a foundational theory for how we orient ourselves in space when communicating. He calls this the joint transactional space. Each person, when acting on their own, has a private space called a transactional segment. For example, when watching the television, a person’s transactional segment is defined as the space that he/she ‘looks [into] and speaks, and in which he/she reaches to handle objects.’ Other persons acknowledge and ‘respect this space, not entering or crossing into it’. This transactional segment is managed by the person’s behaviour. When at least two people get together to do something, they ‘arrange’ themselves such that their transactional segments overlap and create a joint transactional space. These persons ‘agree to maintain joint jurisdiction and control over this space’, termed the ‘o-space’. Kendon cites the example of a group of people standing in a circle in a park, talking.

Management of Communicative Space

The Engagement space and the F-formation system share common features. They both define a social encounter and its organisation, and both frame or bound the function of the interaction. However, they seem to differ in their conception. The F-formation system provides an understanding of physical orientation as a spatial and communicative mechanism that influences the interaction, hence you have shapes, such as the ‘o-space’ and ‘segments’. The Engagement space provides an understanding of communicative orientation as a metacommunication mechanism that influences the interaction, hence you have rhythmic patterns, such as sequential and parallel moves. These embody different space-time coordinates.
Within the F-formation system, persons cooperate to ‘sustain’ the space that enables them to maintain a ‘common focus of attention’. Within the Engagement space, persons cooperate to sustain the space that enables them to remain committed to be together. The F-formation system necessitates the overlapping of individuals’ transactional segments in order to form a joint transactional space. The Engagement space necessitates that the membranes of the person’s body fields are in contact, the degree of which alters with levels of commitment and nature of attitude. Overlap only occurs when bodies move in parallel coordinated action, where the overlap is complete for the period of that action. However, this overlap is only metacommunicatively shared, and does not denote a common focus of attention. In fact, in parallel coordinated action, persons are acting autonomously on different foci of attention, but are aware and attending to each other at the same time (Gill and Borchers, 2003, Gill, 2003a, Gill, 2003b).


Managing Overlapping Space

When there is a disturbance of one person’s transactional segment by another’s to a degree beyond what is acceptable as an overlap, the spatial arrangements between these persons are sustained by ‘cooperative maneuverings’ that correct this (Kendon, op. cit. p.220). In the Engagement Space when there is a disturbance of one person’s body field by another person’s body field, it is because there is a problem in overlapping one body’s field of engagement with the other’s. This necessitates that they re-arrange their relationship to each other so that a feeling of sharing an engagement space is re-established. After a momentary detachment of distance, the rhythmic reconfiguration of the body space between these persons creates a new engagement situation by reshaping their aggregated field of engagement. If there is no problem in the overlap of each person’s body field with the others’, the persons engage in parallel coordinated motion.

Example of a Parallel Coordinated Move

When a designer is making contact with the surface to act upon it, whilst the other person is doing so too, there is an attempt to engage with the body field of the other person, as found in the case of landscape architects drawing up conceptual designs together. It also happens in the example below (Figure 1) of design activity using a whiteboard. The designer on the right side, closest to us (E), enters the body field of the other one (F) who is currently drawing (action), and uses his index finger to trace out a shape to indicate a bed. He is proposing this idea to (F) who is drawing, to get his opinion (negotiation). Both action and negotiation are operating at the surface.
The body field of the person drawing (F) is not disturbed, and as we know from the discussion of the engagement space, and overlapping space, this indicates a high degree of contact and is identifiable as a Parallel Coordinated Move (PCM).

1. E: Do you want us to do like a bed E: CA:suggestion
2. (E moves in to the whiteboard, index finger point touches the E: BM:Focus
3. surface; F is already drawing at the surface).
4. E: and then that then
5. (E's finger traces the outline of a bed) E: PCM
6. (F is drawing at the surface, in a line to the left) F: PCM
7. E: one here E: CA:Suggest
8. (E moves his hand down and taps the surface, of the space E: BM:Dem-Ref
10. that he has just traced, with the back of his hand);
11. (F traces the outline of the bed in the air, moving his hand F: BM:Ack
12. straight to the left and back and then down).
13. E: and then | one here E: CA:Suggest
14. (E lifts his hand up and taps the board again with the back E: BM:Dem-Ref
15. of his hand; at |, F moves his hand back to original position
16. Silence: (E lifts hand off and away from the surface, as F is
17. about to touch it with is pen)
18. F: ye F: CA:Ack
19. (F puts pen back on paper; E's body begins moving back)
20. E: and maybe do like a dresser between them
21. (E’s body moves back to rest-reflection position; F is drawing the beds)

(F) acknowledges (E)’s proposal, in tracing the proposed idea above the surface of the board (Fig. 1, pictures 3 and 4 ) with his pen, whilst (E) taps a position of one bed with the back of his hand on the surface to locate it. F’s acknowledgement through gesture (Ack) [Body Move of acknowledgement] is made whilst E’s continued proposal through gesture (Dem-Ref) [demonstrative reference, Gill et al. 2000] and speech (Suggest) is being made. After tracing (E) continues to draw, and his pen touches the surface (picture 5) at the same time as (E) begins to lift his hand away. There is no break in the fluidity of the rhythm of the coordination between them (of body and speech).
A study of design activity where multiple surfaces are being used, shows how parallel coordinated action can also occur when there is no direct physical proximity on the same surface. Proximity becomes a function of awareness of the state of contact and commitment within an engagement space that extends throughout the design environment for that design task. In the use of multiple boards by multiple designers, overlapping space occurs clearly as a metacommunicative space transposed onto physical space, when the persons’ performance in parallel is coordinated across the surfaces.
Space is considered as the space between bodies, and it is a resonating space. When parallel coordinated action occurs, the resonance is at a peak and this expands the space, giving it salience over time. In sequential Body Moves, resonance between bodies is variable depending on the degree of contact and commitment of the persons to each other, and time is more salient than space.

Autonomy and Cooperation

The most curious finding about the overlap in the parallel coordinated Body Move was that coordinated autonomy is a necessary condition for it. Further, in this overlap, although there is no common focus of attention, there is an awareness of each others’ foci of attention and an attending to it in the rhythmic synchrony performed by the persons. In the studies of collaborative design activity, we find that designers sketching together need to have moments of coordinated autonomy in order to sustain the collaboration. Without it, and when working at a single surface, they can maintain their collaboration, but with reduced commitment and with forced turn-taking strategies in an attempt to gain access to the surface (Borchers and Gill, 2002, Gill and Borchers, 2003). Furthermore, when the autonomy is not coordinated, the design activity in a collaborative situation, become disturbed, and the designers use communicative strategies with sequential body moves, to regain the coordinated autonomy so that they can act at the same time (Gill and Borchers, 2003; Gill, 2003b). In a discussion about tacit knowing, a deeper understanding is gained about how coordinated autonomy, involving different but related projects, can facilitate knowledge transformation (Gill, 2003b) or emergence (Polanyi, 1966) within learning and collaborative processes.

Conclusion

The F-formation system and the Engagement Space theory together provide an understanding of the physical and metacommunicative orientations in the body during communication. The former takes us from the individual to the group situation, and in so doing, necessitates an overlapping of the physical space of action of each person with the other. The latter, developed from within the group situation, takes us through sequential and parallel rhythms in coordination that alter the relation between self and other self. In parallel rhythm, the overlapping of metacommunicative space is complete, but not based on a common focus of attention, as in the F-formation system. Rather, it is based on different but related foci of attention through coordinated autonomous actions. The matacommunicative system and the physical communication system present different levels of insights into a social encounter and its organisation and how it is framed. For example, the individuals’ transaction segments are aggregated in the engagement space, without metacommunicatively overlapping, but physically overlapping. Hence, imagine that I am drawing something with you on a shared sheet of paper, the sequential Body Moves that we perform of action-reaction (to show we acknowledge, agree, disagree, accept, etc), are the dynamics within the overlap of our physical communicative space, but do not overlap at a metacommunicative level. The parallel Body Moves we perform of, say, drawing different parts of the design at the same time on this sheet of paper, do not overlap in physical communicative space, but completely overlap in metacommunicative space. A challenge is to develop a matrix that maps the metacommunicative system onto the physical communicative system to create an interactive space framework. The discussion presented here is the initial step towards this.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Adam Kendon for encouraging me to develop the idea of the engagement space further and to consider his work, and thanks to Terry Winograd and Jan Borchers for their support of this work within the iSpaces project at Stanford. Lastly, thanks to Ray McDermott for pointing me back to Scheflen and Bateson’s work on metacommunication.

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