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.

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.

The role of our bodies in our meaning-making has been mostly absent in discussions concerning interactions with LLMs.Acknowledging this gap, this paper explores the use of ChatGPT as a tool for somatic introspection towards finding the words that "feel right" to our bodies and emotions.We document our three-month, firstperson collaborative process using haiku-making and ChatGPT framed around Gendlin's concept of "felt sense" -a type of ineffable bodily awareness that precedes representational meaning.In uncovering the potential of LLMs to support somatic introspection and self-reflection, we contribute two design qualities, which invite designers to consider (1) Ongoing temporalities -that is, interactions in and beyond the screen and (2) Idiolectic resonance, which considers the complexity of our idiosyncratic language expression.In navigating uncertainty, designing for somatic introspection redirects trust towards our bodies, opening for less data-centric ways of designing for reflection.

This pictorial introduces entangled weathers, a noticing tactic that poetically examines the interplay between our internal states and external weather. By drawing from the feminist concept of weathering and the introspective practice of noticing the weather inside, this work highlights how bodies are situated in a dynamic overlap between nature, culture, space, and time. Anchored in stories grounded in the author's design practice, this pictorial illustrates how cultivating sensibilities towards the weather brings several actionable viewpoints to notice, including (1) measuring and mapping, (2) uncovering space and time reflections, (3) weathering narratives, (4) metaphorising and (5) surrendering control. This work invites design researchers to reflect on their own weathers and emerging themes, connecting with sensuous knowledge central to more-than-human design.

Designing technologies that clothe, adorn, or are otherwise placed on the body raises questions concerning the role they will play in dressing ourselves. We situate self-fashioning - or the process through which we stylise and present our bodies - as a complex practice where a series of social, material, and contextual factors shape how we present ourselves. Informed by reflective discussions and projective design tools, we contribute three critical points of departure for self-fashioning technologies: (i) Purposeful examining discomfort as an ongoing phenomenon, (ii) Supporting mimesis and visibility as qualities to be negotiated, and (iii) Envisioning the multiplicity of the body. We call for the design community to help devise fashionable technologies that are sensitive, caring, and responsive to the complexities of fashioning our bodies.

We reappraise the idea of colliding with robots, moving from a position that tries to avoid or mitigate collisions to one that considers them an important facet of human interaction. We report on a soma design workshop that explored how our bodies could collide with telepresence robots, mobility aids and a quadruped robot. Based on our findings, we employed soma trajectories to analyse collisions as extended experiences that negotiate key transitions of consent, preparation, launch, contact, ripple, sting, untangle, debris and reflect. We then employed these ideas to analyse two collision experiences, an accidental collision between a person and a drone and the deliberate design of a robot to play with cats, revealing how real-world collisions involve the complex and ongoing entanglement of soma trajectories. We discuss how viewing collisions as entangled trajectories, or ‘tangles’, can be used analytically, as a design approach, and as a lens to broach ethical complexity.

Chronic pain can be debilitating, taking over our senses and potentially destroying our means of describing our experiences. In this pictorial, we contribute three concepts based on the analysis of autosomatographies, a first-person narrative approach from illness and disability studies to communicate experiences of pain. These concepts suggest designers consider pain as (a) self-agentic, (b) a tool for empowerment, and (c) a means of creative expression. We illustrate the generation of these concepts through the first author's autosomatographical journals, highlighting how visual research greatly contributes to articulating expressive felt qualities of pain for design use. To exemplify the translation of these concepts into tangible prototypes, we retrospectively analysed two soma design case studies created to appreciate our bodies and learn from pain. We discuss the importance of acknowledging the persistence of chronic pain and the ethics of engaging in this type of design work.

To rigorously approach the more-than-human world in design research, we need to become more receptive and better equipped to describe the complexities of relationality. In response, this paper advocates for the articulation of the felt sense -or tacit knowledge residing in our bodies- as a viewpoint for noticing. Assisted by micro-phenomenological interviews, we carefully described our felt senses from our experiences with a telepresence robot and smartphone photography. We illustrate how this viewpoint allowed us to access our pre-judgemental dimension, the vivid liveliness in our experiences with technologies, and the porosity of our sense of self. We contribute the felt sense as a viewpoint for noticing to design researchers interested in integrating their somatic sensibilities into their work with the more-than-human, allowing them to attune to, describe and share with other researchers the normally unattended dimension of our experiences, including aspects concerning the felt dimension of ethics.

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.

We theoretically develop the ethical positions implicit in somaesthetic interaction design and, using the case study of a water faucet, illustrate our conceptual understanding of ethical sensibilities in design. We apply four lenses – the felt self, intercorporeal self, socio-cultural and political self, and entangled self – to show how our selves and ethical sensibilities are fundamentally constituted by a socially, materially, and technologically entwined world. Further, we show how ethical sensibilities are cultivated in the practice of somaesthetic interaction design. We contribute felt ethics as an approach to cultivating ethical sensibilities in design practice. The felt ethics approach is comprised of (i) a processual cultivation of ethical sensibility through analytical, pragmatic, and practical engagement, (ii) an ongoing critical attentiveness to the limits of our own bodies and lived experiences, and (iii) the rendering visible of our ethical practices as a matter of care.

As interaction designers are venturing to design for others based on autobiographical experiences, it becomes particularly relevant to critically distinguish the designer’s voice from others’ experiences. However, few reports go into detail about how self and others mutually shape the design process and how to incorporate external evaluation into these designs. We describe a one-year process involving the design and evaluation of a prototype combining haptics and storytelling, aiming to materialise and share somatic memories of earthquakes experienced by a designer and her partner. We contribute with three strategies for bringing others into our autobiographical processes, avoiding the dilution of first-person voices while critically addressing design flaws that might hinder the representation of our stories.

The goal of this studio is to explore the qualities of unhabitual body movements to inform the design of close-to-the-body touch technologies. After engaging with unhabitual kinesthetic activities, we will use visual and textual elicitation tools to communicate emerging felt sensations. We propose the use of photography as an open-ended visual medium and a repertoire of textural metaphors as a textual tool - a vocabulary list of felt qualities that will be extended through the participants’ contribution. We will then collectively explore how these expressions of felt sensations can be translated into concrete design elements via tangible design ideation and making.

Attending to the challenges of describing first-person experience, this article illustrates different uses of the Focusing method in interaction design and HCI, offering a systematic way of accessing the subtle qualities of lived experiences for design use. In this approach, the implicit bodily knowledge -or felt sense- becomes the material capture of aesthetic experiences used to inform data collection, ideation and prototyping. We offer a high-level, yet systematic coverage of Focusing applied to two case studies, informing both a set of instructions to use the method and a series of design considerations to adopt this understudied tool of introspection in interaction design research and practice.

We articulate vulnerability as an ethical stance in soma design processes and discuss the conditions of its emergence. We argue that purposeful vulnerability – an act of taking risk, exposing oneself, and resigning part of one’s autonomy – is a necessary although often neglected part of design, and specifically soma design, which builds on felt experience and stimulates designers to engage with the non-habitual by challenging norms, habitual movements, and social interactions. With the help of ethnography, video analysis, and micro-phenomenological interviews, we document an early design exploration around drones, describing how vulnerability is accomplished in collaboration between members of the design team and the design materials. We (1) define vulnerability as an active ethical stance; (2) make vulnerability visible as a necessary but often neglected part of an exploratory design process; and (3) discuss the conditions of its emergence, demonstrating the importance of deliberating ethics within the design process.

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.

Through this pictorial, I propose a generative method for the elicitation of autoethnographic themes for design research. This dialogue with tangible traces uses photography in conversation with tangible body maps (TBMs) towards harvesting evocative content for exploration. This dialogical tool functions as a way of generating conceptual knowledge inspired by the self and environment, including other subjectivities. This dialogue with tangible traces contributes to first-person design research, where traceability and communicability of outcomes become necessary preconditions for rigour. Although systematic, this method also respects the non-prescriptive and drifting nature of design.

There is a growing interest amongst the HCI community to access and articulate the core of experiences for design use. The premise is that, by accessing detailed accounts of everyday experiences, we can obtain refined material for the design of interactive systems more connected with our bodies and emotions. This TEI studio aims to introduce participants to the basis of phenomenologically grounded techniques in combination with the use of tangible materials as a way to articulate experience from the inner self, applied to the evaluation of existing technologies. This studio offers an alternative to assessment tools that rely on a predefined repertoire of feelings, to instead focus on emergent, complex and unclear aspects of our emotions. These strange collections of emotions -or felt senses- will be further explored through self-reporting tools and group exercises.

Pulsante (translates as Pulsating) is a new-media device representing a large-scale model of a human heart. It captures the essential elements of the organ in order to highlight a clear visualisation of the circulatory system. The aims of this transdisciplinary work are twofold: (1) To allow the audience to connect with themselves and others, fostering conversation and curiosity, and (2) to function as an educational device, showing the rhythms of the heart by following scientific conventions. Aspects such as artistic expression and their situated metaphors, invite audiences to perceive the heart as a collective force. As the installation adapts its behaviour to the pulse of the person interacting with it, we also introduce small elements of situatedness, adapting the piece to the particularities of the place where it is exhibited. Finally, in terms of research questions, we seek to understand: How the audience reacts when they visualise a piece of information that remains normally hidden to their sight? How does the presence of others influence their reception?

Although not always consciously collected, bodily information shapes the way we construct meaning. By paying attention towards the subtle changes of the soma, it is possible to access part of the ongoing source of meaning and self-knowledge contained in the inner self. In this paper, we describe how the use of wearable devices to amplify direct perception in conjunction with the somatic technique Focusing can facilitate the articulation of the tacit dimension of people's experiences. The perceptible feedback generated by wearable props opens up a dialogue space between the soma and intellect, acting as a facilitator to connect people with unknown aesthetic aspects of their personal stories. Beyond mere amplification of sensation, wearable technology can potentially assist in the ongoing human process of meaning-generation.

Our bodily dimension plays a fundamental role in the ongoing construction of meaning. Exploring the potential of this perspective, this paper describes the structure of a one-day workshop entitled: The body as a source of aesthetic qualities for design: Explorations and techniques. In this workshop, participants will engage with a series of somatic exercises to get in contact with their senses, aiming to reach their tacit, less explicit dimension. Aesthetic qualities emerging from the act of filtering out ideas through the body will be used as generative tools for creativity, as well as for interrogation of subjective experience. By using a series of wearable devices and artefacts from everyday life participants will explore the nuanced differences between sensing and felt-sensing, and how the use of somatic tools and stimuli from wearables can shape the way personal narratives are expressed.

Wearable technology brings computation in intimate proximity to the body, raising questions about the role of the body in interacting with tools. The disappearance of self and technology in achieving transparent and skilful action -- the ideal aspiration of ubiquitous and context-aware computing -- overlooks the potential of self-awareness as a critical resource for interactive experiences grounded in the body. We propose a body-centred perspective on wearable technology informed by phenomenological theories on the body-tool relationship and pragmatist Somaesthetics prioritising the cultivation of the self through somatic awareness for improved life quality. We extend Heidegger's concept of present-at-hand with a new concept of present-at-body, defined as the reflective use of tools for developing bodily self-awareness. In our body-centred approach to wearable technology, we emphasise the dynamic interplay between visibility and transparency of body and tool as a fundamental resource for learning and self-development.