Micro-phenomenology has recently gained traction in HCI as ways of accessing embodied, lived dimensions of interaction that resist conventional qualitative capture. By foregrounding pre-reflective experience, this approach promises greater experiential precision. However, when designers and HCI researchers attempt to apply Micro-phenomenology in practice, frictions often emerge. The method was not originally designed for design contexts, raising questions about accessibility, adaptability, and epistemic fit. We ask what is gained, transformed, or compromised when micro-phenomenology is brought into design research, and how they might evolve through situated practice. The workshop combines hands-on demonstrations of interviewing and analysis with guided reflective listening, followed by rotating small-group dialogues and material exploration. By bringing together researchers and practitioners interested in embodied and experiential approaches to HCI, the workshop aims to broaden access to micro-phenomenology while spurring critical dialogue about their limitations, transformations, and potential contributions to design research.

Learning clothes repair is challenging for novices, who face interconnected procedural and embodied challenges, especially when learning alone. Existing tools fail to provide holistic support as interactive tutors and lack awareness of the embodied interactions of working with textiles. This paper presents a multi-phase study that investigates these challenges and explores the design space for a Human-Touch-Aware conversational agent (RepairBot). We began with an in-depth autoethnography to understand the novice experience, which informed the development of the RepairBot Conversation Framework (RBCF) together with a design implementation of a technology probe. Using the RepairBot prototype together with a Wizard-of-Oz approach to simulate Human-Touch-Awareness, we investigated how a conversational agent could support repair learning in novices as well as engage them with their own clothes-repairing projects. Subsequent lab and in-home studies with novice participants suggested specific conversational and embodied mechanisms that would facilitate novices’ holistic understanding of repair, increase their confidence, and elicit attentive touch and emotional reflection. We bring these mechanisms together in the framework presented in this paper.

Touch exploration of fabric is used to evaluate its properties, and it could further be leveraged to understand a consumer’s sensory experience and preference so as to support them in real time to make careful clothing purchase decisions. In this paper, we open up opportunities to explore the use of technology to provide such support with our FabricTouch dataset, i.e., a multimodal dataset of fabric assessment touch gestures. The dataset consists of bilateral forearm movement and muscle activity data captured while 15 people explored 114 different garments in total to evaluate them according to 5 properties (warmth, thickness, smoothness, softness, and flexibility). The dataset further includes subjective ratings of the garments with respect to each property and ratings of pleasure experienced in exploring the garment through touch. We further report baseline work on automatic detection. Our results suggest that it is possible to recognise the type of fabric property that a consumer is exploring based on their touch behaviour. We obtained mean F1 score of 0.61 for unseen garments, for 5 types of fabric property. The results also highlight the possibility of additionally recognizing the consumer’s subjective rating of the fabric when the property being rated is known, mean F1 score of 0.97 for unseen subjects, for 3 rating levels.

The tactile experience of fabric is not only a sensory experience but also an affective one. Our choice of fabric products, like clothing, is often based on how they feel. Effectively communicating such experiences is crucial for designing tactile fabric experiences. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive understanding of the fabric tactile and affective experiences, preventing the development of tools to facilitate the communication of these experiences. In this paper, we examine the fabric experiences of 27 participants towards nine cotton samples. We combine qualitative and quantitative methods to create FabTouch, a novel tool to facilitate a dialogue in the design of fabric experiences. We found six phases of fabric touch experiences including fabric touch responses, sensory associations, and emotional responses. Initial feedback from designers suggested that FabTouch could enrich design processes both in practice and in education and can create inspiration for physical and digital design explorations.

When cooking we negotiate between instructions in recipes and personal preferences to make in-the-moment creative decisions. This process represents moments of creativity that utilise and reveal our embodied knowledge. This paper focuses on the capture of expressions of embodied knowledge by digitally-networked utensils. We present a design process investigating the design of tangible interfaces to capture and communicate embodied knowledge as a proposition for recipe authoring tools for open innovation in food. We reflect upon this process to discuss lessons about the individual nature of embodied knowledge and its expression, and the context of capturing it to make design recommendations.

Studying tactile experience is important and timely, considering how this channel is being harnessed both in terms of human interaction and for technological developments that rely on it to enhance experience of products and services. Research into tactile experience to date is present mostly within the social context, but there are not many studies on the understanding of tactile experience in interaction with objects. In this paper, we use textiles as a case study to investigate how we can get people to talk about this experience, and to understand what may be important to consider when designing technology to support it. We present a qualitative exploratory study using the `Elicitation Interview' method to obtain a first-person verbal description of experiential processes. We conducted an initial study with 6 experienced professionals from the fashion and textiles area. The analysis revealed that there are two types of touch behaviour in experiencing textiles, active and passive, which happen through `Active hand', `Passive body' and `Active tool-hand'. They can occur in any order, and with different degrees of importance and frequency in the 3 tactile-based phases of the textile selection process - `Situate', `Simulate' and `Stimulate' - and the interaction has different modes in each. We discuss these themes to inform the design of technology for affective touch in the textile field, but also to explore a methodology to uncover the complexity of affective touch and its various purposes.

Handling textiles is not only a semantic experience, but also an emotional one. Whilst handling a textile is crucial for its appreciation and understanding, this channel is still little explored in the digital realm, where focus has been given to the haptic feedback aspect of handling. In this paper, we discuss the importance of touch behaviour in interactive digital handling to allow people to explore, emotionally engage with and understand textile properties. We build on our findings from previous studies, where we investigated how people handle fabrics in real-life situations and more generally how their touch behaviour may affect the experience, relating it to literature from textile, HCI, embodied cognition and embodied affect to discuss how current technology should develop to provide a more realistic touch experience. Additionally, we consider how crowd sourcing of the textile experience could be extended by taking into account non-verbal expressions of textile-handling experience. We show that further knowledge is needed to design interactive technology that supports active and unconstrained touch, as well as the affective aspects of experience.

Current interactive media presentations of textiles provide an impoverished communication of their 'textile hand', that is their weight, drape, how they feel to touch. These are complex properties experienced through the visual, tactile, auditory and proprioceptive senses and are currently lost when textile materials are presented in interactive video. This paper offers a new perspective from which the production of multi-touch interactive video representations of the tactile qualities of materials is considered. Through an understanding of hand properties of textiles and how people inherently touch and handle them, we are able to develop methods to animate and bring these properties alive using design methods. Observational studies were conducted, noting gestures consumers used to evaluate textile hand. Replicating the appropriate textile deformations for these gestures in interactive video was explored as a design problem. The resulting digital textile swatches and their interactive behavior were then evaluated for their ability to communicate tactile qualities similar to those of the real textiles.