‘I like the focused connection with my body when I dance’, but…
The iconic song from the movie ‘Dil Dhadakne Do’ is about two people enjoying their heart, body and love out in a Dance Studio in a cruise. It is free-flowing, full of energy, they are burning calories and all they care about is living in the moment.
That is exactly the answer we got when we asked our dance enthusiasts friends “Why do you dance?”. From our breadth of user research we did with casual and professional dancers we learnt that people enjoy dancing. We enjoy the ‘focused connection with our bodies as we move through space’. We enjoy the feeling of ‘expressing oneself’, ‘being true to yourself’, for some it’s about ‘the shared connection with other people’ ,for some ‘it’s about the form’ and for some ‘it is one of the best ways to workout’. I personally love to see myself dance just to see the shape my body takes and I find it extremely freeing.
But not all of us are that lucky when it comes to the skill of dancing. We love to dance, but we are often limited by our knowledge of techniques, movement or coordination. Dancing involves understanding space, co-ordination of different parts of our bodies, understanding the tune and following the rhythm. It involves simultaneous complex processing of light, sound, space and people. Learning to dance is not easy.
We asked our friends about the challenges while learning to dance and it ranges from ‘lack of personalized attention in a dance class’ to ‘limited time with the choreographer’ to ‘finding a good class that I enjoy’ and most importantly ‘lack of feedback’. Specially for the ones who teaches themselves how to dance from YouTube or other online platforms in their home space, there is barely any form of feedback mechanism. For beginners starting out a new form or attending workshops with other trained dancers which is how it usually is in open classes for adults, this is not a happy experience since we neither get to learn the basics of the form, nor do we enjoy the process of learning. Often people feel a sense of being left out in the shared space because of the lack of attention and the gap in the right posture.
This is where our team ‘Dhin’, based out of Cornell Tech Studio space comes in to solve the problem of dance learning experience more-accessible and enjoyable through light,sound and haptic feedback with the help of a wearable anklet. We are a group of passionate dancers at heart who understand that technique is as important as the connection with our body. We understand the lack of feedback mechanism in the whole learning experience and we are researching ways to solve this by our aesthetic programmable wearable.
We are still in the early stages of our startup. Stay tuned for more updates about our product.
Tell us about your dance learning experience. “Why do you like to dance?” and “How can we improve your dance learning experience?
