The coming ubiquity of computational things urges us to consider what it means for something to be present in someone's life, in contrast to being just used for something. "Use" and "presence" represent two perspectives on what a thing is. While "use" refers to a general description of a thing in terms of what it is used for, "presence" refers to existential definitions of a thing based on how we invite and accept it as a part of our lifeworld. Searching for a basis on which these existential definitions are formed, we argue that the expressions of things are central for accepting them as present in our lives. We introduce the notion of an expressional, referring to a thing designed to be the bearer of certain expressions, just as an appliance is designed to be the bearer of a certain functionality. Aesthetics, as a logic of expressions, can provide a proper foundation for design for presence. We discuss the expressiveness of computational things as depending both on time structures and space structures. An aesthetical leitmotif for the design of computational things---a leitmotif that may be used to guide a normative design philosophy, or a design style---is described. Finally, we describe a practical example of what designing a mobile phone as an "expressional" might be like.

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.

There is a growing interest in designing systems for sharing experience through bodily interaction. To explore this design space, we built a probe system we named the Lega. In our 2-month-long research design process, we noted that the users' attention was set on their own reflective experience, rather than attending to the person(s) with which they were sharing their experience. To explain these findings, we present an inductive analysis of the data through a phenomenological lens to pinpoint what causes such behavior. Our analysis extends our understanding of how to design for social embodied interaction, pointing to how we need to embrace the tension between self-reflection and shared experience, making inward listening and social expression visible acts, accessible to social construction and understanding. It entails experiencing our embodied self as others experience us in order to build a dialogue.

This is an analysis and exploration of a basic aesthetic issue in interaction design: how an ambition to design strong and persistent relations between appearance and functionality, evident in approaches such as tangible user interfaces, in crucial ways in which conflicts with the ways miniaturization of technology have changed the relation between the object's surface and its internal complexity. To further investigate this issue, four conceptual design experiments are presented exploring the expressiveness and aesthetic potential of overloading the object's surface by adding several layers of interaction, thus creating a kind of tangled interaction.

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.