In a long-term commitment to designing for the aesthetics of human–drone interactions, we have been troubled by the lack of tools for shaping and interactively feeling drone behaviours. By observing participants in a three-day drone challenge, we isolated components of drones that, if made transparent, could have helped participants better explore their aesthetic potential. Through a bricolage approach to analysing interviews, feld notes, video recordings, and inspection of each team’s code, we describe how teams 1) shifted their eforts from aiming for seamless human–drone interaction, to seeing drones as fragile, wilful, and prone to crashes; 2) engaged with intimate, bodily interactions to more precisely probe, understand and defne their drone’s capabilities; 3) adopted diferent workaround strategies, emphasising either training the drone or the pilot. We contribute an empirical account of constraints in shaping the potential aesthetics of drone behaviour, and discuss how programming environments could better support somaesthetic perception–action loops for design and programming purposes.

We present a novel intercorporeal experience - an intersubjective haptic voice. Through an autobiographical design inquiry, based on singing techniques from the classical opera tradition, we created Corsetto, a kinesthetic garment for transferring somatic reminiscents of vocal experience from an expert singer to a listener. We then composed haptic gestures enacted in the Corsetto, emulating upper-body movements of the live singer performing a piece by Morton Feldman named Three Voices. The gestures in the Corsetto added a haptics-based 'fourth voice' to the immersive opera performance. Finally, we invited audiences who were asked to wear Corsetto during live performances. Afterwards they engaged in micro-phenomenological interviews. The analysis revealed how the Corsetto managed to bridge inner and outer bodily sensations, creating a feeling of a shared intercorporeal experience, dissolving boundaries between listener, singer and performance. We propose that 'intersubjective haptics' can be a generative medium not only for singing performances, but other possible intersubjective experiences. © 2023 Owner/Author.

In a collaboration between Samsung Electronics’ Mobile UX and Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) we created a teaching material on how to design with AI. The material is aimed for UX-designer and consists of design principles, example designs, UX-values, ethics and a business proposition motivating why and where to use AI in the Galaxy UX. 

In this paper, we refect on the applicability of the concept of trajectories to soma design. Soma design is a frst-person design method which considers users’ subjective somatic or bodily experiences of a design. Due to bodily changes over time, soma experiences are inherently temporal. Current instruments for articulating soma experiences lack the power to express the efects of experiences on the body over time. To address this, we turn to trajectories, a well-known concept in the HCI community, as a way of mapping this aspect of soma experience. By showing trajectories through a range of dimensions, we can articulate individual experiences and diferences in those experiences. Through analysis of a set of soma experience designs and a set of temporal dimensions within the experiences, this paper demonstrates how trajectories can provide a practical conceptual framing for articulating the temporal complexity of soma designs.

We report on a somaesthetic design workshop and the subsequent analytical work aiming to demystify what is entailed in a non-dualistic design stance on embodied interaction and why a first-person engagement is crucial to its unfoldings. However, as we will uncover through a detailed account of our process, these first-person engagements are deeply entangled with second- and third-person perspectives, sometimes even overlapping. The analysis furthermore reveals some strategies for bridging the body-mind divide by attending to our inner universe and dissolving or traversing dichotomies between inside and outside; individual and social; body and technology. By detailing the creative process, we show how soma design becomes a process of designing with and through kinesthetic experience, in turn letting us confront several dualisms that run like fault lines through HCI’s engagement with embodied interaction.

The work draws on repurposing practices to inform design for deletion and handling of digital waste -- a way of letting go -- in graceful and aesthetically appealing ways.

Delete by Haiku is a mobile phone application that explores how deleting old text messages can become an enjoyable and creative practice by turning messages into haiku poetry. Through the application users interactively repurpose selected old text messages on their mobile phone into a haiku poem aided by a haiku-generating algorithm. By repeatedly pinching the selected messages they break apart into words that tumble down in a Tetris like manner. Gradually words are deleted until the remaining words find their position and form a haiku.

The video presents a walkthrough of how to interact with the application to select messages in various ways, how to apply "themes" to gain some control over the generation process, and eventually share created poems with others through social media.

Our overall vision for Mobile Life has been to create a society where happiness, playfulness and creativity are factors in peoples’ everyday lives. Through the ten years of research, the centre has become a strong voice advocating a human centred focus on digitalisation – focusing on what makes a good life for all. More importantly, we have provided a path to how this can be done – in our design processes, in our tools, in new business models, and in how we approach studies of life styles in change. The Mobile Life Way that is, our way of engaging in design-led exploration of novel technology, based on social science, art, design thinking, aesthetics and value-based concerns, is a unique approach that has rendered results that will continue to inspire. Our design work has often been many years ahead of the commercial front and today we see many of the design concepts from the earlier years of Mobile Life being provided as commercial products. This includes, for example, our work on wearable biosensors for wellbeing and health and tools for amateur video production. To address the vision of a good life, the centre has initiated and developed unusual and evocative research topics such as: integrating digitalisation with the fashion industry; connecting back to nature and engaging animals in interaction; designing with felt life and bodily engagement; pervasive games; or studying the life style changes that follow from the sharing economy. These research topics have changed the academic frontiers of our field. Taken together these explorations paint a broad picture of a whole society in change. A consumer-oriented Internet of Things society is no longer a prospect, but a reality. This enables a future where disruption could potentially create conflict, inequality, decrease inclusion and directly harm the success of Swedish companies and way of life. As a reaction to this negative view we have instead envisioned a positive world where digital technologies causes disruption that enhances engagement, creativity and enjoyment. In doing so, we have not shunned from the political and ethical implications of our work, dealing with topics such as the importance of empowerment of all to be makers and participants in a highly technologically-infused society. These results continue to be important – to our partners, to academic research in our field, as well as to the whole society. Ultimately, both the history of Mobile Life and the way forward can be captured in our credo: Always Explore! Always Create! Always Enjoy!

Movement-based interaction design is increasingly popular, with application domains ranging from dance, sport, gaming to physical rehabilitation. In a workshop at CHI 2016, a set of prominent artists, game design-ers, and interaction designers embarked on a research journey to explore what we came to refer to as "aesthetics in soma-based design". In this follow-up work-shop, we would like to take the next step, shifting from discussing the philosophical underpinnings we draw upon to explain and substantiate our practice, to form our own interaction design theory and conceptualisations. We propose that soma-based design theory needs practical, pragmatic as well as analytical study -- otherwise the felt dimension will be missing. We will consider how such tacit knowledge can be articulated, documented and shared. To ground the discussion firmly in the felt experience of our own practice, the work-shop is organised as a joint practical design work session, supported by analytical study.

Repurposing refers to a broad set of practices, such as recycling or upcycling, all aiming to make better use of or give new life to physical materials and artifacts. While these practices have an obvious interest regarding sustainability issues, they also bring about unique aesthetics and values that may inspire design beyond sustainability concerns. What if we can harness these qualities in digital materials? We introduce Delete by Haiku, an application that transforms old mobile text messages into haiku poems. We elaborate on how the principles of repurposing -- working on a low budget, introducing chance and combining the original values with the new ones -- can inform interaction design in evoking some of these aesthetic values. This approach changes our views on what constitutes "digital materials" and the opportunities they offer. We also connect recent debates concerning ownership of data with discussions in the arts on the "Death of the Author."

We propose a strong concept we name Somaesthetic Appreciation based on three different enquiries. First, our own autobiographical design enquiry, using Feldenkrais as a resource in our design process, bringing out the Soma Carpet and Breathing Light applications. Second, through bringing in others to experience our systems, engaging with and qualitatively analysing their experiences of our applications. In our third enquiry, we try to pin down what characterizes and sets Somaesthetic Appreciation designs apart through comparing with and analysing others’ design inquiries as well as grounding them in the somaesthetic theories. We propose that the Somaesthetic Appreciation designs share a subtleness in how they encourage and spur bodily inquiry in their choice of interaction modalities, they require an intimate correspondence – feedback and interactions that follow the rhythm of the body, they entail a distinct manner of making space shutting out the outside world – metaphorically and literally – to allow users to turn their attention inwards, and they rely on articulation of bodily experiences to encourage learning and increased somatic awareness.