The Pelvic Chair is a shape-changing chair that touches the pelvic area. Through rhythmic and gentle movements on different parts of the pelvic area, the touch interactions from the Pelvic Chair invite attention to the anatomy, muscles, and connectedness. We present a user study with 14 participants focusing on their experience of being touched by the Pelvic Chair. Through our qualitative analysis of participants’ experiences, we show that meaningful touch can offer an active approach to sensing the pelvic floor that contributes to increasing somatic literacy - becoming familiar with the pelvic floor, being able to feel and distinguish between tension and relaxation, and establishing new connections between the pelvic floor and the body. Using the Pelvic Chair as a design case we show the potential for technology-initiated touch in providing an intimate and safe way of touching and connecting with the body. 

Kuddi is a haptic data physicalisation in the form of a soft pillow which combines 12 inflatable pockets to dynamically touch and be touched in relation to the changing menstruating body. This paper presents the soma design process that led to Kuddi’s design, as well as Kuddi’s evaluation through an auto-ethnographic approach, where the first author lived with Kuddi for two menstrual cycles. The resulting dataset was analysed by the research team using a narrative-led approach. Based on this analysis, we present five thick descriptions that capture how the experience of living with Kuddi led to a changing relation with menstrual pain. We contribute a design case of a haptic data physicalisation intended to touch the body and discuss how the material and interaction design choices embodied in Kuddi led to data visceralisation - a way of feeling data in ways which promote new somatic knowledge and experience. 

How can we cultivate deeper attunement to one another, ourselves, and the environment that can, in turn, inform and enrich design? Over the course of four workshops conducted across 1.5 years - primarily outdoors - the authors engaged in prolonged periods of shared silence. This collective silence functioned as an estrangement method, revealing the porous and interdependent boundaries between people and things, mutually constituting one another. We unpack some of the experiential qualities emerging from these experiments and mobilize them for future design processes, including: cultivating multifaceted sensibilities, dynamic modes of noticing and interacting, such as coming together and dispersing, being alone together, and acting or playing in unison; the malleability of silence to specific, orchestrated design activities, such as cooking or designing; and reframing silence, not as an absence, but as a presence - rich with sounds, interactions, and possibilities for engagement. We discuss how to set up temporal and spatial boundaries, alongside boundaries within and between ourselves.

We present a qualitative study with five healthcare experts specialised in different types of touch practice to gain insight in how caring touch can be enacted. Through our analysis we focus on how to transfer this learning into design considerations towards enacting caring touch from technologies. Despite the rapidly growing expectation for and design interest in touch from technologies intending to enhance care and well-being, the knowledge on how to design caring touch is still fragmented. How caring touch is enacted in inter-personal touch is under-explored and such expertise from healthcare practitioners has not been engaged from the perspective of HCI design research. We propose designers to consider caring as an experiential quality instead of a division between instrumental types of touch and caring types. We recommend when designing for a caring quality in technology-initiated touch that designers create a progression of touch with dynamic sensitivity and adapt the materiality of actuating devices to the plural dimensions of the body’s textures. 

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.