A Cabinet of Affective Touches (ACAT) represents an approach to generate tacit design knowledge and build a repository for creating, experiencing and reflecting on designing affective touch with soft robotic technology. Despite being increasingly recognised as a somaesthetic material for affective touch interactions, knowledge on technical parameters and the experiential quality of touch with soft robotic technology is investigated fragmentally in separate disciplines. Sixty four haptics design students used the ACAT platform and created a repository of seventeen designs intended for all primary affective dimensions, covering both positive and negative affective experience. We illustrate how this process cultivated tacit design knowledge and fostered critical reflection on novel design space, in particular, on how to facilitate the creation and sharing the designs of uncomfortable touch.

Biosensing technologies are on their way to becoming ubiquitous in multimedia interaction.These technologies capture physiological data, such as heart rate, breathing, skin conductance, and brain activity.Researchers are exploring biosensing from perspectives including engineering, design, medicine, mental health, consumer products, and interactive art.These technologies can enhance our interactions, allowing us to connect with our bodies and others around us across diverse application areas.However, the integration of biosignals in HCI presents new challenges pertaining to choosing what data we capture, interpreting these data, its representation, application areas, and ethics.There is a need to synthesize knowledge across diverse perspectives of researchers and designers spanning multiple domains and to map a landscape of the challenges and opportunities of this research area.The goal of this workshop is to exchange knowledge in the research community, introduce novices to this emerging field, and build a future research agenda.

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.

There is an increasing interest in the HCI community in designing for bodily practices. We report on a soma design process for martial arts and the resulting artifact – an interactive wooden dummy. Through a detailed account of the design process, we show how it enriched and revamped the bodily practice, but also how it changed the martial arts expert in the design team. Based on a phenomenological account of his experiences, we argue that the estrangement methods in soma design may allow practitioners engaging as soma designers, to cultivate and create new artistic habits fused with thought and feeling, changing themselves and their practice in directions they seek.

We report on a soma design process, where we designed a novel shape-changing garment—the Soma Corset. The corset integrates sensing and actuation around the torso in tight interaction loops. The design process revealed how boundaries between the garment and the wearer can become blurred, leading to three flavours of cyborg relations. First, through the lens of the monster, we articulate how the wearer can adopt or reject the garment, resulting in either harmonious or disconcerting experiences of touch. Second, it can be experienced as an organic “other”-with its own agency-resulting in uncanny experiences of touch. Through mirroring the wearer’s breathing, the garment can also be experienced as a twisted version of one’s own body. We suggest that a gradual sensitisation of designers-through soma design and reflection on the emerging human-technology relations-may serve as a pathway for uncovering and articulating novel, machine-like, digital touch experiences.

In this paper we present our late-breaking work in leveraging a soft robotic fiber-based wearable system for the transposition of somatic knowledge and experience within the context of singing. We examine how the transposition of the physical nuances of singing from one body to another, or multiple other bodies, is possible by engaging with a soma design process. We share our findings in the context of experience transposition, resulting in a preliminary prototype: a pneumatically controlled soft robotic garment—called ADA (short for air-driven actuator) for re-enacting felt experiences of singing onto the human body. We contribute with 1) our initial findings in transposing singing experiences between and across bodies, and 2) a preliminary wearable robotic garment to mediate intersomatic experiences of singing.