How can large language models (LLMs) support critical design explorations for describing, articulating, and responding to bodily phenomena? This study investigates the integration of code-generating LLMs across design explorations in four different self-tracked or bio-sensed domains: learning, chronic illness, posture control, and knee injury. We synthesise our collaborative research through design inquiries into three themes: 1) forced articulation of fuzzy phenomena, 2) difficulty of escaping local optima, and 3) unexpected fragility of generated sketches. These themes, though potentially applicable in other domain contexts, are grounded in our challenges with code-generating LLMs on embodied and embodiment subjects, with a particular focus on working with technology and data relevant to embodied experiences. We propose two implications for design of LLM-based sketching tools anchored on our design inquiry journeys.

This study explores the phenomenon of energy and self-tracking technologies, moving beyond the context of managing chronic conditions. Our approach to designing from the experiences of people with disability is informed by crip theory, which challenges societal norms of health and ability. We analysed 50 survey responses and 15 interviews with wearable tracker users and found that self-tracking shapes interpretation of energy and self-care strategies. Our findings indicate that tracking significantly affect perceptions and judgments of bodily activity, energy and rest. We found a notable disconnect between the metrics provided by the trackers and the subjective understanding of personal energy meanings, especially during events of bodily and contextual changes such as travelling, illness, or menstrual cycle. This research contributes to discourses on energy in self-tracking technologies and advocates for designing more inclusive, crip futures for everyone that celebrate irregularity, fluctuation, and change, accommodating diverse bodily rhythms in energy tracking practices.

How can we cultivate deeper attunement to one another, ourselves, and the environment that can, in turn, inform and enrich design? Over the course of four workshops conducted across 1.5 years - primarily outdoors - the authors engaged in prolonged periods of shared silence. This collective silence functioned as an estrangement method, revealing the porous and interdependent boundaries between people and things, mutually constituting one another. We unpack some of the experiential qualities emerging from these experiments and mobilize them for future design processes, including: cultivating multifaceted sensibilities, dynamic modes of noticing and interacting, such as coming together and dispersing, being alone together, and acting or playing in unison; the malleability of silence to specific, orchestrated design activities, such as cooking or designing; and reframing silence, not as an absence, but as a presence - rich with sounds, interactions, and possibilities for engagement. We discuss how to set up temporal and spatial boundaries, alongside boundaries within and between ourselves.

The role of our bodies in our meaning-making has been mostly absent in discussions concerning interactions with LLMs.Acknowledging this gap, this paper explores the use of ChatGPT as a tool for somatic introspection towards finding the words that "feel right" to our bodies and emotions.We document our three-month, firstperson collaborative process using haiku-making and ChatGPT framed around Gendlin's concept of "felt sense" -a type of ineffable bodily awareness that precedes representational meaning.In uncovering the potential of LLMs to support somatic introspection and self-reflection, we contribute two design qualities, which invite designers to consider (1) Ongoing temporalities -that is, interactions in and beyond the screen and (2) Idiolectic resonance, which considers the complexity of our idiosyncratic language expression.In navigating uncertainty, designing for somatic introspection redirects trust towards our bodies, opening for less data-centric ways of designing for reflection.

This paper critically examines the machine learning (ML) modeling of humans in three case studies of well-being technologies.Through a critical technical approach, it examines how these apps were experienced in daily life (technology in use) to surface breakdowns and to identify the assumptions about the "human" body entrenched in the ML models (technology design).To address these issues, this paper applies agential realism to decenter foundational assumptions, such as body regularity and health/illness binaries, and speculates more inclusive design and ML modeling paths that acknowledge irregularity, human-system entanglements, and uncertain transitions.This work is among the first to explore the implications of decentering theories in computational modeling of human bodies and well-being, offering insights for more inclusive technologies and speculations toward posthuman-centered ML modeling.

Envisioning alternative futures and desirable worlds is a core element of design that must be cultivated, especially when a deep transition of practices, values, and power is necessary for vibrant and just future lifeworlds. In this paper, we contribute towards fabulation as an approach for design futuring that foregrounds feminist commitments and more-than-human concerns. Analyzing two fabulation case studies around biodata and bodily fluids, we offer three themes based on our process of developing these fabulations: how they engage materials, how they work to trouble temporalities, and how they cultivate imagination. We argue for the emerging potential of fabulation as an approach for open-ended, joyful design futuring, mobilizing speculative storytelling to foreground absent or neglected relations when imagining alternative lifeworlds.

As we engaged in designing digital interventions for intercultural dialogues around public cultural heritage sites, we saw an opportunity to surface multiple interpretations and points of view of history and shine a critical lens on current societal issues. To do so, we present the results of a collaborative auto-ethnography of alternative tours accompanied by intercultural guides, to explore sensory and embodied engagements with cultural heritage sites in a southern European capital. By focusing on the differences in how we experienced the heritage sites, we analyse the duality of discomfort, a common concept in HCI, in that it can both be deployed as a resource for designing systems that can transform people’s understanding of history or it can be a hindrance for engagement, having an unequal effect on individuals.

A growing number of design researchers explore engagement with and through biodata. To help make sense of this growing space, we synthesize three emergent themes: (1) expanding notions of biodata and bodies, (2) attending to a greater diversity of human bodies and experiences with biodata, and (3) biodata collaborations between human and non-human bodies. We illustrate these themes with selected design examples. From this synthesis, we develop three interconnected fabulations reimagining alternative engagements with biodata: Weaving Alongside, Diffracting Selves, and Collective Affect. Our discussion unpacks conceptual work of the fabulations, offering invitations for design research to explore alternative ways of living and knowing together with biodata.

Recent design research has shown an interest in diffraction and agential realism, which promise to offer generative alternatives when designing with data that resist treating data as objective or neutral. We explore engaging diffractively with ‘lived data’ to surface felt and prospective aspects of data as it is entangled in everyday lives of designers. This paper presents five biodata-based case studies demonstrating how design researchers can create knowledge about human bodies and behaviors via strategies that allow them to engage data diffractively. These studies suggest that designers can find insights for designing with data as it is lived by working with it in a slow, open-ended fashion that leaves room for messiness and time for discovering difference. Finally, we discuss the role of ambiguous, open-ended data interpretations to help surface different meanings and entanglements of data in everyday lives.

Soma design is intended to increase our ability to appreciate through all our senses and lead to more meaningful interactions with the world. We contribute a longer-term study of soma design that shows evidence of this promise. Using storytelling approaches we draw on qualitative data from a three-month study of the soma mat and breathing light in four households. We tell stories of people’s becomings in the world as they learn of new possibilities for their somas; and as their somas transform. We show how people drew on their somaesthetic experiences with the prototypes to find their way through troubled times; and how through continued engagement some felt compelled to make transformations in how they live their lives. We discuss the implications for the overarching soma design program, focusing on what is required to design for ways of leading a better life.

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 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.

Though seemingly straightforward and habitual, breathing is a complex bodily function. Problematising the space of designing for breathing as a non-habitual act pertaining to different bodies or situations, we conducted a soma design exploration together with a classical singer. Reflecting on how sensors could capture the impact and somatic experience of being sensed led us to develop a new sensing mechanism using shape-change technologies integrated in the Breathing Shell: a wearable that evokes a reciprocal experience of “feeling the sensor feeling you” when breathing. We contribute with two design implications: 1) Enabling reflections of the somatic impact of being sensed in tandem with the type of data captured, 2) creating a tactile impact of the sensor data on the body. Both implications aim to deepen one’s understanding of how the whole soma relates to or with biosensors and ultimately leading to designing for symbiotic experiences between biosensors and bodies.

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.

This paper documents the experiences of those living under state surveillance. We interviewed our participants about how they lived under threat, and how it changed their technology practices. Our participants spanned three groups - journalists who reported from countries where their activities were illegal; activists who took part in civil disobedience, and individuals who worked in illegal activities that would have likely led to prosecution. In our analysis we cover four themes: first, 'the imagined surveillant'. Second, the danger and dependencies of technology use, third, their coping strategies, and lastly how belonging to a group can protect but also expose. In our discussion we cover how we can design for dissidents, and how to deal with the difficult questions this raises. We conclude by advocating for research that takes into account a critical view of the state in HCI and more broadly for an anti-surveillance stance in the design of technologies.

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.

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.

Skin conductance is an interesting measure of arousal level, largely unfamiliar to most end-users. We designed a mobile application mirroring end-users’ skin conductance in evocative visualizations, purposefully made ambiguous to invite rich interpretations. Twenty-three participants used the system for a month. Through the lens of a practice-based analysis of weekly interviews and the logged data, several quite different—sometimes even mutually exclusive—interpretations or proto-practices arose: as stress management; sports performance; emotion tracking; general life logging; personality representation; or behavior change practices. This suggests the value of a purposefully open initial design to allow for the emergence of broader proto-practices to be followed by a second step of tailored design for each identified goal to facilitate the transition from proto-practice to practice. We contribute to the HCI discourse on ambiguity in design, arguing for balancing openness and ambiguity with scaffolding to better support the emergence of practices around biodata.

In the 1920s, Oskar Schlemmer, artist in the Bauhaus movement, created the Triadic Ballet costumes. These re-strict movement of dancers, creating new expressions. In-spired by this, we designed an interactive wire costume. It restricts lower body movements, and emphasizes arm movements spurring LED-light 'sparks' and 'waves' wired in a tutu-like costume. The Wire Costume was introduced to a dancer who found that an unusual bond emerged be-tween her and the costume. We discuss how sensory altera-tion (sight, kinesthetic awareness and proprioception) and bodily training to adjust to the new soma, can result in nov-el, evocative forms of expression. The interactive costume can foster a certain mood, introduce feelings, and even embody a whole character -- only revealed once worn and danced. We describe a design exploration combining cul-tural and historical research, interviews with experts and material explorations that culminated in a novel prototype.

Malaria surveillance is a practice concerned with collection and analysis of data. This paper presents an ethnographical account of an international team of researchers producing data about malaria in the Zanzibar archipelago. We show that malaria is increasingly constituted by data, and inextricably interwoven with the practices of data workers using ICT tools. Through the practices we document here malaria: 1) becomes a problem to be managed by asymptomatic, as well as symptomatic individuals, 2) increases its geographical incidence through surveillance data and articulation work, and 3) becomes more certain, through coordination mechanisms enabled by ICT. As electronic data, malaria builds and mobilizes diverse human, organizational, and infrastructural worlds around it, who must now be dedicated to its production, management, and care.

We have designed a stress management biofeedback mobile service for everyday use, aiding users to reflect on both positive and negative patterns in their behavior. To do so, we embarked on a complex multidisciplinary design journey, learning that: detrimental stress results from complex processes related to e.g. the subjective experience of being able to cope (or not) and can therefore not be measured and diagnosed solely as a bodily state. We learnt that it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to make a robust analysis of stress symptoms based on biosensors worn outside the laboratory environment they were designed for. We learnt that rather than trying to diagnose stress, it is better to mirror short-term stress reactions back to them, inviting their own interpretations and reflections. Finally, we identified several experiential qualities that such an interface should entail: ambiguity and openness to interpretation, interactive history of prior states, fluency and aliveness.