To support sketching in soma design processes, we built the Soma Bits. These simple technology pieces enable one bit actuation like vibration, heat or shape-changing behaviors. After using them for three years, we ask how well they support soma design processes and what designs they spur? Through analyzing nine soma design projects, we note how they contributes to forming subtle, intimate, body awareness designs, as well as fast, uncomfortable, sensory misaligned, somaesthetic designs or skill training. More importantly, experiencing actuation in the early sketching phases helps the design team to articulate joint somatic understanding and direction. During past design sessions, we noticed that the Soma Bits lack support for the overall orchestration: looping, tweaking, or arranging sequences of interactions, and coupling sensing to actuation. Hence, we present a novel Soma Bits toolkit concept for sketching, composing, documenting, and sharing somatic experience.

In this paper, we reflect on the applicability of the concept of trajectories to soma design. Soma design is a first-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 effects 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 differences 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.

Biosensing technologies are increasingly available as off-the-shelf products, yet for many designers, artists and non-engineers, these technologies remain difficult to design with. Through a soma design stance, we devised a novel approach for exploring qualities in biodata. Our explorative process culminated in the design of three artefacts, coupling biosignals to tangible actuation formats. By making biodata perceivable as sound, in tangible form or directly on the skin, it became possible to link qualities of the measurements to our own somatics - our felt experience of our bodily bioprocesses - as they dynamically unfold, spurring somatically-grounded design discoveries of novel possible interactions. We show that making biodata attainable for a felt experience - or as we frame it: turning biodata into somadata - enables not only first-person encounters, but also supports collaborative design processes as the somadata can be shared and experienced dynamically, right at the moment when we explore design ideas.

We report on a workshop bringing together researchers working in soma design and sensory misalignment. Creating experiences that make use of sensory misalignment has become increasingly common, often associated with virtual reality research. However, little attention has been paid to how to design such experiences. We argue that the practice of soma design is a relevant candidate method for designing misalignment experiences, since soma design brings with it concepts such as estrangement and disrupting the habitual as a path to design. We further argue that sensory misalignment may in turn extend soma design methods, adding methods for explicitly disrupting sensory perception using technology interventions. Finally, we draw on the findings of that workshop to discuss the ideas of: pluralism in experience; orchestration of overall experience; as well as the broader intersection of soma design and sensory misalignment approaches.

We devised a Soma Design curriculum with accompanying teaching approaches for a seven-week course at a technical university. In our analysis of students' design concepts and process accounts, we found that they had opened an unusually rich and aesthetically engaging design space. But we also noted how they sometimes struggled with processes such as: "staying in the undecided" long enough to engage deeply with somaesthetic design imaginings; finding, refining and repeatedly returning to an aesthetic quality through the different phases of their design work; liberating them-selves from pre-existing practices or objects in order to find entirely novel design possibilities; shifting from a more rationalistic design process, mainly based on argumenta-tion, into a felt engagement were imaginations are acted out - not talked about; and lacking a technical toolkit for somaesthetically experiencing interactive sociodigital materials. Based on these insights, we provide a set of recommendations for how to teach Soma Design, and we have created an accompanying Soma Design toolkit that will support exploration and design.

Experience Centered Design (ECD) implores us to develop empathic relationships and understanding of participants, to actively work with our senses and emotions within the design process. However, theories of experience-centered design do little to account for emotion work undertaken by design researchers when doing this. As a consequence, how a design researcher's emotions are experienced, navigated and used as part of an ECD process are rarely published. So, while emotion is clearly a tool that we use, we don't share with one another how, why and when it gets used. This has a limiting effect on how we understand design processes, and opportunities for training. Here, we share some of our experiences of working with ECD. We analyse these using Hochschild's framework of emotion work to show how and where this work occurs. We use our analysis to question current ECD practices and provoke debate.

In the last decade, the number of articles on HCI and health has increased dramatically. We extracted 139 papers on depression, anxiety and bipolar health issues from 10 years of SIGCHI conference proceedings. 72 of these were published in the last two years. A systematic analysis of this growing body of literature revealed that most innovation happens in automated diagnosis, and self-tracking, although there are innovative ideas in tangible interfaces. We noted an overemphasis on data production without consideration of how it leads to fruitful interventions. Moreover, we see a need to promote ethical practices for involvement of people living with affective disorders. Finally, although only 16 studies evaluate technologies in a clinical context, several forms of support and intervention illustrate how rich insights are gained from evaluations with real patients. Our findings highlight potential for growth in the design space of affective health technologies.

Communication through visible light (VLC) is gaining ground as an alternative to traditional radio communication in many settings. Effectively using VLC in creative design processes may however be difficult as the material properties of VLC can be hard to grasp and therefore to use. This paper presents a design exploration where a set of artifacts was created to enable designers to play around with VLC and better understand its properties and their potential use for design. Each artifact was designed to illustrate a particular property of light communication ranging from inner workings of transmission protocols to properties of light in itself. The set was used in two small scale workshops where users played around with the artifacts and afterward were interviewed about their experiences. Interviews and observations from the workshops suggest that users gained insights into the material properties of light communication and were also inspired to think of creative uses for VLC based on those insights

This paper is an introduction to the "Future IKEA Catalogue", enclosed here as an example of a design fiction produced from a long standing industrial-academic collaboration. We introduce the catalogue here by discussing some of our experiences using design fiction` with companies and public sector bodies, giving some background to the catalogue and the collaboration which produced it. We have found design fiction to be a useful tool to support collaboration with industrial partners in research projects - it provides a way of thinking and talking about present day concepts, and present day constraints, without being overly concerned with contemporary challenges, or the requirements of academic validation. In particular, there are two main aspects of this we will discuss here, aspects that are visible in the enclosed catalogue itself. The first is the potential of design fiction as a sort of 'boundary object' in industry and academic collaboration, and second the role of critique. After this introduction to the paper we enclose the output of our collaboration in the form of the catalogue itself.