Soma design research at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, originated over 10 years ago as an interaction design research approach based on somaesthetic and feminist philosophy. Soma design is a first-person approach to designing full-body interaction with the aim of deepening somaesthetic appreciation. Here, we analyze its development as a design research program, drawing on practical design examples as well as conceptual developments. Key insights for readers interested in soma design research and similar approaches concern: learning and appropriation as individual and meliorative processes; design representations including somatic and sympoietic materials and tools; and the scope of soma design research from a first-person perspective towards the intersubjective and the systemic. A more general contribution, potentially relevant for all readers interested in programmatic design research, is an approach to assessing a program in terms of its generativity, transferability, and scope relative to an aesthetic worldview that the program both enacts and refines through intentional design work, tracing how both program and worldview drift over time.

Coffee cup reading is a popular social activity in some cultures and seen as a playful way of speculating on a person's past, present and future life. If we think of coffee cup reading as a way to envision futures, can we use this practice as a method for creating speculative design fictions? This paper proposes a workshop in which 10 people living in Venice will enact future inhabitants of the city and read each other's coffee cup in pairs to create speculative design fictions that envision Venice in 2030. The workshop will result in a catalogue of design fictions comprising text and drawings produced by each pair that will present different future visions for Venice. After the exhibition, this catalogue will be exhibited in a dedicated online space to present the design fictions and photos and/or videos created during the workshop as well as visitors' feedback. The workshop aims to provide insights about how coffee cup reading as a traditional way of looking into possible futures could be used as a low-threshold design activity to reveal urban inhabitants’ visions and concerns towards uncertain futures as well as today's challenges.

Designing useful human-AI interaction for clinical workflows remains challenging despite the impressive performance of recent AI models. One specific difficulty is a lack of successful examples demonstrating how to achieve safe and efficient workflows while mitigating AI imperfections. In this paper, we present an interactive AI-powered visual search tool that supports pathologists in cancer assessments. Our evaluation with six pathologists demonstrates that it can 1) reduce time needed with maintained quality, 2) build user trust progressively, and 3) learn and improve from use. We describe our iterative design process, model development, and key features. Through interviews, design choices are related to the overall user experience. Implications for future human-AI interaction design are discussed with respect to trust, explanations, learning from use, and collaboration strategies.

The challenge of how cities can be designed and developed in an inclusive and sustainable direction is monumental. Smart city technologies currently offer the most promising solution for long-term sustainability. However, smart city projects have been criticised for ignoring diverse needs of the local population and increasing social divides. A sustainable urban environment depends as much on creating an inclusive space that is safe, accessible and comfortable for a diverse group of citizens as it does on deploying “smart” technologies for energy efficiency or environmental protection. This is because citizens will be more likely to adopt technologies promoting sustainability if they are well-aligned with their lived needs and experiences. In this paper, we present the rationale behind an ongoing interdisciplinary research project that aims to address exactly the problem outlined above by using a participatory design approach. Focusing on a smart city test site in Sweden where sensors are currently being deployed to collect data on noise, particles, vehicle numbers and types (amongst other), the goal is to bring local residents and government representatives into dialogue with technical developers by adopting a “meet-in-the-middle” approach. This paper comprises a brief presentation of early findings and a reflection on this approach.

We present potentials of creating excuses as a central metaphor for a design strategy - excuses to interact (a "ticket to talk") as a way to facilitate social interactions among participants. Interaction design has, in its third wave, moved towards the more abstract experiential potentials of designing for embodied playful interactions, but much is needed to understand the dynamics of social interaction and how one can design for social curiosity. With this perspective we move beyond tangible curiosity, attempting to break restraint, timidity and shyness - using touch to design for bending social norms. We build the concept of creating excuses to interact based on three large experiments with interactive art installations presented in a festival context. We attempt to convert the particular design cases into general understandings of a set of potential design strategies, with the intention to create generative design knowledge. Extremely simple technical rules can be designed with the sole purpose of breaking down normal social restraints and provoking interesting social interaction.

Design-oriented research practices create opportunities for constructing knowledge that is more abstracted than particular instances, without aspiring to be at the scope of generalized theories. We propose an intermediate design knowledge form that we namestrong conceptsthat has the following properties: is generative and carries a core design idea, cutting across particular use situations and even application domains; concerned with interactive behavior, not static appearance; is a design element and a part of an artifact and, at the same time, speaks of a use practice and behavior over time; and finally, resides on an abstraction level above particular instances. We present two strong concepts—social navigation and seamfulness—and discuss how they fulfil criteria we might have on knowledge, such as being contestable, defensible, and substantive. Our aim is to foster an academic culture of discursive knowledge construction of intermediate-level knowledge and of how it can be produced and assessed in design-oriented HCI research.

We discuss the design ideal of explicit interaction, which is a way to approach the dimensions of explicitness versus ambience and explicitness versus obtrusiveness in ubiquitous computing. Explicit interaction refers to interaction techniques designed to make actions and intentions visible, understandable and accountable. We introduce three levels of analysis---usability, materialization, and social performance---and present the design of an explicit interaction assembly of devices for rehabilitation after hand surgery. The assembly, intended to support video recording during patient-therapist consultations, is evaluated and we find that it provides superior usability and the potential to improve rehabilitation outcomes through materialization. Moreover, we find that the design of cues to support the social practice in the rehabilitation ward needs to be improved since the assembly allowed for uses unanticipated during the design.

Post-hoc worknotes is a concept demonstration, an envisionment showing how workgroup communication could be supported using a combination of existing technologies in the field of nontextual information management. We have identified a number of use-driven requirements for video content management, including the tailoring of metadata structures to project and process models.

Sens-A-Patch is an interactive visualization technique based on overlapping clusters on a 2D space. It is intended for long-term use of personal label collections and aims at providing a fluent medium for restructuring and serendipitous discovery. Sens-A-Patch implements the principles of spatial meaning, focus+context and tight coupling in a space-efficient way. It is also shown empirically to be usable for broadcast media, such as Web-site index pages. Further developments in managing social information spaces and collecting implicit relevance feedback are outlined.

The use of user-interface design knowledge such as general guidelines and environment-specific style guides can be valuable, and is increasingly required in professional user-interface design. However, conventional guidelines and style guides (gl and sg) in the form of documents are consistently found hard to use. We have earlier demonstrated knowledge-based critiquing to be a technically feasible way of delivering relevant gl and sg knowledge. The purpose of this study was to investigate the need and acceptability of such techniques for professional user-interface designers. An experiment was carried out where four professional designers developed user-interface prototypes to a functional specification. The designs were evaluated using our gl and sg-based critiquing system, which identified a total of 17 deviations from style-guide requirements or design recommendations. Interviews were conducted with the designers to find the reasons for the deviations and to identify important requirements for a critiquing design-support tool. The deviation analysis points to an existing need for better ways of accessing gl and sg knowledge. The interviews indicate that the designers would find a critiquing tool valuable, provided that it leaves them in control of their work and indicates the severity of the detected deviations.

The motivation for our work is that even though user interface guidelines and style guides contain much useful knowledge, they are hard for user interface designers to use. We want to investigate ways of bringing the human factors knowledge closer to the design process, thus making it more accesible to designers. To this end, we present a knowledge-based tool, containing design knowledge drawn from general guideline documents and toolkit-specific style guides, capable of evaluating a user interface design produced in a UIMS. Our assessment shows that part of what the designers consider relevant design knowledge is related to the user's tasks and thus cannot be applied to the static design representation of the UIMS. The final section of the paper discusses ways of using this task-related knowledge.

From a user interface point of view, expert systems are different from applications in general in that the reasoning process of the system often defines the dialogue structure. This has several advantages, but there may also be problems due to the lack of separation between functionality and user interface. This paper investigates the possibility of treating an expert system user interface as separate from the reasoning process of the system, and the consequences thereof.