The body plays an important role in building and maintaining emotional relationships. When a loved one dies, it is inevitable that their body will decease, meaning that physical closeness can no longer be experienced. In this paper, we engage with material ways to extend experiences of physical and emotional nearness beyond death. We explore the design space of ‘bodily heirlooms’: crafted, precious, interactive objects designed to pass on bodily impressions beyond lifespan. We review cultural practices that intend to bequeath the body, and related work that addresses death, bereavement and digital heirlooms. After that, we describe the design and making process of three bodily heirlooms, reflections in and on action, and reactions of visitors who inspected the heirlooms during an exhibition. We conclude by discussing notions of heirlooms’ preciousness, the emotional bond between heirlooms and their maker and how the process can be understood as a feminist practice.

Drawing from a present need as well as a growing interest towards developing methods to engage participants in research remotely [1,2], this workshop focuses on identifying opportunities and challenges around designing with children from an embodiment perspective [3,4,5,6,10,11,12,13,15]. Themed around whole body interaction and digital technologies [3,7,8,9,10,11,14,15,16,17,18,20,21] the aim of this workshop is to gain methodological insights for the remote participation of children in design, and arrive at design insights addressing the question how we can design remote, inclusive whole body interactions for and with children while attending to child participants’ multimodal communication and bodily engagement [19,21] in a physically dislocated setting [1,2]. The workshop will involve discussions around data gathering from different angles, including relational, ethical, safety and practical perspectives, to create a comprehensive picture of what it entails to orchestrate embodied co-design workshops with children virtually. Outputs from the workshop will contribute to the IDC community by offering methodological insights from attendees’ own experience and presented case studies from researchers and practitioners from both non-academic and academic settings to support children's embodied engagement in remote workshop situations and beyond.

Grandparents and grandchildren, who cannot meet face-to-face (e.g., due to dislocation or physical distancing induced by a pandemic), often use audio-visual communication tools in order to maintain their relationship online. In a qualitative online survey (n = 85), we inquired into the various ways that grandparents and grandchildren came up with when being physically distant; many of them are tangible in nature as they include “things” or incorporate “spaces”. In this paper, we illustrate related temporal and spatial trajectories and unpack how online meetings are characterized by constant negotiations of agency. We discuss how online meetings could complement face-to-face meetings, instead of mimicking or replacing them. We finally articulate a collection of design sensitivities with the aim to both inspire and question designing for intergenerational online meetings.

Living dislocated from family, friends or partners can result in negative emotions and a lack of physical, bodily closeness. We focus on materialising the negative consequences associated with living far apart in a textile form, and manifest those in two pairs of wearable artefacts: first, WARMTH, which simulates the bodily distance between remote people through a decrease in felt temperature, and second, BREATH, which embodies the bodily absence of a remote other through a decline in mechanical movement of textiles. The wearables are ‘discussion artefacts’ that enable conversation about, reflection on and exchange of personal, negative, vulnerable and challenging emotions connected to living far apart. The stance taken in this pictorial emphasises the necessity to focus not only on overcoming and bridging the distance between remote people through interactive artefacts; but also, to consider and manifest melancholic and possibly negative personal experiences.

Physical discomfort can be highly personal, difficult to discern from the outside, challenging to effectively communicate. Yet communicating discomfort can be of great value. We present a method for developing wearables that transfer one person's discomfort to another: a modified fashion ideation process that enables a person to bring their hidden embodied experiences into wearable form. Using five complementary foci, the method seeks to simulate rather than replicate; to support people to find abstracted expressions for their lived experiences of discomfort, with which to negotiate shared understanding. The resulting wearables support empathic engagement with how another person might feel. Physical discomfort can be highly personal, difficult to discern from the outside, challenging to effectively communicate. Yet communicating discomfort can be of great value. We present a method for developing wearables that transfer one person's discomfort to another: a modified fashion ideation process that enables a person to bring their hidden embodied experiences into wearable form. Using five complementary foci, the method seeks to simulate rather than replicate; to support people to find abstracted expressions for their lived experiences of discomfort, with which to negotiate shared understanding. The resulting wearables support empathic engagement with how another person might feel.