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.

In a long-term commitment to designing for the aesthetics of human–drone interactions, we have been troubled by the lack of tools for shaping and interactively feeling drone behaviours. By observing participants in a three-day drone challenge, we isolated components of drones that, if made transparent, could have helped participants better explore their aesthetic potential. Through a bricolage approach to analysing interviews, field notes, video recordings, and inspection of each team’s code, we describe how teams 1) shifted their efforts from aiming for seamless human–drone interaction, to seeing drones as fragile, wilful, and prone to crashes; 2) engaged with intimate, bodily interactions to more precisely probe, understand and define their drone’s capabilities; 3) adopted different workaround strategies, emphasising either training the drone or the pilot. We contribute an empirical account of constraints in shaping the potential aesthetics of drone behaviour, and discuss how programming environments could better support somaesthetic perception–action loops for design and programming purposes.

We invite technology practitioners to join us in the collaborative exploration of discomfort associated with technology in the age of surveillance capitalism. With the help of body-based exercises inspired by choreography we will articulate the discomforts of living and designing with extractivist technology. Our studio is aimed at technology practitioners of a broad range of expertise who have experienced discomfort in relation to data-driven extractivist systems. In the first part of the studio participants will share their experiences of resisting such systems both as users and creators of technology. In the second part, participants will engage in an ideation session to propose forms of countering existing technologies. Embodied methods and choreographic approaches will be used for making digital discomfort tangible and for guiding the exploration of the topics at stake. As an outcome, participants will collectively design a toolbox to conceptualise discomfort in a tangible, embodied way, and form a network to continue discuss these matters post-studio in an online community discussion group.

While searching for consumer goods, users frequently ask for suggestions from their peers by writing short free-form textual requests. For example, when searching for movies users may ask for “Drama movies with a mind-bending story and a surprise ending, such as Fight Club” in one of the many online discussion boards. Despite the recent developments in large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP), modern recommender systems still struggle to process such requests. Therefore, in this paper we evaluate several approaches for annotating structured information from such short, free-form natural language user texts to calculate recommendations. We set up this evaluation as a two phase processes including (a) identification of the best NLP approach to identify key elements of users’ requests, and (b) assessment of the quality of recommendations computed with such elements. For our evaluation, we use a gold-standard reddit movie recommendation dataset consisting of annotations, manually created by crowdworkers who extracted keywords, actor names and movie titles. Using this dataset we evaluate a collection of more than 30 NLP and five recommender approaches. In addition, we perform an ablation study to assess relative annotation importance for movie recommendations. We find that domain-specific deep learning models, trained on a subset of data as well as embedding-based recommendation approaches are able to match the recommendation performance of recommendations computed from manual annotations. These promising results warrant further investigation in automatic processing of short free-form texts for computation of recommendations. Specifically, we provide insights into which NLP models and configurations work best for automatically annotating free text to compute (movie) recommendations, hence substantially reducing the search space for combinations of NLP and recommendation algorithms in the movie and potentially other domains.

Attending to emotion can shed light on why recognizing an ethical issue and taking responsibility for it can be so demanding. To examine emotions related to taking or not taking responsibility for ethical action, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 23 individuals working in interaction design and developing AI systems in Scandinavian countries. Through a thematic analysis of how participants attribute ethical responsibility, we identify three ethical stances, that is, discursive approaches to answering the question 'who should act': an individualised I-stance ("the responsibility is mine"), a collective we-stance ("the responsibility is ours"), and a distanced they-stance ("the responsibility is someone else's"). Further, we introduce the concepts of distancing and vulnerability to analyze the emotion work that these three ethical stances place on technology practitioners in situations of low- and high-scale technology development, where they have more or less control over the outcomes of their work. We show how the we- and they-stances let technology practitioners distance themselves from the results of their activity, while the I-stance makes them more vulnerable to emotional and material risks. By illustrating the emotional dimensions involved in recognizing ethical issues and embracing responsibility, our study contributes to the field of Ethics in Practice. We argue that emotions play a pivotal role in technology practitioners' decision-making process, influencing their choices to either take action or refrain from doing so.

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.

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.