Through a soma design process, we explored how to design a shape-changing car seat as a point of interaction between the car and the driver. We developed a low-fdelity prototyping tool to support this design work and describe our experiences of using this tool in a workshop with a car manufacturer. We share the co-designed patterns that we developed: re-engaging in driving; dis-engaging from driving; saying farewell; and being held while turning. Our analysis contributes design knowledge on how we should design for a car seat to ‘touch’ larger, potentially heavier parts of the body including the back, shoulders, hips, and bottom. The non-habitual experience of shape-changing elements in the driver seat helped pinpoint the link between somatic experience and intelligent rational behaviour in driving tasks. Relevant meaning-making processes arose when the two were aligned, improving on the holistic coming together of driver, car, and the road travelled. 

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. 

The Pelvic Chair uses soft robotics to gently touch the outer pelvic floor to create awareness of its anatomy and function. Our pelvic floor is an important muscle group that holds up our inner organs. A soma design approach makes out a novel route to know through our senses what an experience in this context feels like, which can provide alternative ways of being in the world. Through annotated imagery, we explore the affordances of soft latex pockets filled with air to convey touch that is appropriate for this intimate, sensitive area. Iteratively, we investigate how layers of materials, area, shape, volume and temporality, together with the specific placement on the body, convey the kinds of experiential qualities we seek. We highlight that somatic design judgements are crucial in guiding this process, going beyond traditional approaches to design that focus on visual assessments, models, or hand-based touch.

Body maps are visual documents, where somatic experiences can be drawn onto a graphical representation of an outline of the human body. They hold the ability to capture complex and non-explicit emotions and somatic felt sensations, elaborating narratives that cannot be simply spoken. We present an illustrative example of "how-to"complete a body map, together with four case studies that provide examples of using body maps in design research. We identify five uses of body maps as generative tools for soma-based design, ranging from sampling bodily experience, heightening bodily self-awareness, understanding changing bodily experience over time, identifying patterns of bodily experience, and transferring somatic experiential qualities into physical designs. The different requirements for scaffolding the use of body maps in user-centred design versus first-person autobiographical design research are discussed. We provide this Pictorial as a resource for designers and researchers who wish to integrate body maps into their practice. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Soma design is intended to increase our ability to appreciate through all our senses and lead to more meaningful interactions with the world. We contribute a longer-term study of soma design that shows evidence of this promise. Using storytelling approaches we draw on qualitative data from a three-month study of the soma mat and breathing light in four households. We tell stories of people's becomings in the world as they learn of new possibilities for their somas; and as their somas transform. We show how people drew on their somaesthetic experiences with the prototypes to find their way through troubled times; and how through continued engagement some felt compelled to make transformations in how they live their lives. We discuss the implications for the overarching soma design program, focusing on what is required to design for ways of leading a better life.

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.

We reflect back on a previous paper writing process, where we initially set out to share experiences of forest walks and discuss how these were part of a design process for an application around sustainable grocery shopping. We describe our inability in finding a working way of articulating the experiences and the design process led us into route of unintended rationalization and systematization. Instead of strengthening our arguments and articulation of the value in our forest walks, we step by step rationalized our design decisions by tying them to discrete occurrences in the forest, shaping a paper that fitted the traditional form of HCI research. In this paper we reflect on this process and how our original intentions could be reached. Finally, we reason around the value of these forms of purposeless experiences in relation to design, and how there could be space for these types of contributions in HCI.

Skin conductance is an interesting measure of arousal level, largely unfamiliar to most end-users. We designed a mobile application mirroring end-users’ skin conductance in evocative visualizations, purposefully made ambiguous to invite rich interpretations. Twenty-three participants used the system for a month. Through the lens of a practice-based analysis of weekly interviews and the logged data, several quite different—sometimes even mutually exclusive—interpretations or proto-practices arose: as stress management; sports performance; emotion tracking; general life logging; personality representation; or behavior change practices. This suggests the value of a purposefully open initial design to allow for the emergence of broader proto-practices to be followed by a second step of tailored design for each identified goal to facilitate the transition from proto-practice to practice. We contribute to the HCI discourse on ambiguity in design, arguing for balancing openness and ambiguity with scaffolding to better support the emergence of practices around biodata.