Machine Learning (ML) models are increasingly applied to wearable self-tracking technologies to offer daily classifications and recommendations for well-being. This shift introduces design challenges, particularly regarding the opacity of training processes and model outputs. We contribute to this space with a conceptual framing of the algorithmic gaze on body and well-being, which we use to critically investigate long-term engagement with a wearable self-tracking technology. Through an autoethnographic study with the Oura Ring, we identified three themes, highlighting tensions between wearer and the ML models, namely: Conflicting narratives of daily activities, fine-tuning of the human, and blurry boundaries of multiple bodies using such devices simultaneously. Departing from the themes, we used fabulation as a method to craft narratives that probe the tensions from the algorithmic gaze, from which we offer alternative design openings for ML in wearable self-tracking devices.

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.

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.

In this article, we present breathing-with as a contribution to cultivating concrete design tactics engaging with the more-than-human. We arrive at the concept based on an analysis of three distinct projects, each aimed at exploring the relationality between human and non-human bodies, and of extending the notion of the body in design processes toward the more-than-human, with a focus on breath and breathing. We analyze each project from the perspective of how breathing allowed us as designers to move from the intimate experience of our own bodies into an extended bodily awareness that included the more-than-human as material, living and social bodies. Based on this exploration, we propose breathing-with as a design tactic that can be used throughout the design process. We further reflect on how breathing-with can provide a generative design tactic for zooming in and out of the entangled relationships between human and more-than-human bodies, through surfacing notions of intimacy and vulnerability.

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.

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.

Menstruation and fertility tracking applications are of increasing concern in HCI research, as their use becomes more widespread. Methods are needed to understand how such applications become entangled in everyday practices. While these apps promise increased self-knowledge of reproductive potential by collecting intimate data about reproductive bodies, they also restrict the knowledge produced about users’ bodies and embed normative understandings of reproduction and gender. In this paper, we scrutinize the normativities of reproductive bodies by deploying the “walkthrough method” to uncover sociotechnical entanglements of the menstruation and fertility apps Clue, Tilly, and Drip. We discuss how the walkthrough method contributes to HCI's methodological repertoire for studying intimate bodily tracking apps and unpacking their normativities. We offer suggestions for using this method to critically analyze existing apps and extend approaches to design with and for a plurality of in/fertile bodies.

In this paper we present LYDSPOR; a site-specific sound experience, created in Elsinore, Denmark, consisting of two physical installations and an app-based soundwalk, which together allow people to feel and sense in their bodies certain narrative fragments of the history of the city. LYDSPOR is the result of a 1,5 year-long research project which had the aim of adopting soma design methods by drawing on affective interaction design and on an understanding of bodies as always multiple, relational, and never only human. Through an analysis of the design process and its outcome, the paper contributes an in-depth understanding of how to combine somatic and affective design approaches when creating site-specific sonic augmentations for historical dissemination in public space.

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.

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.

Engaging with new types of programmable and smart materials in interaction design requires that we develop a deeper understanding of the somatic experiences that such materials can evoke. This pictorial presents an autobiographical exploration grounded on soma design methods that led to the Breathing Wings wearable: Covering the area of the back, it offers a dynamic embracing experience created through soft shape- changing materials, inviting the wearer to re-experience neglected body parts, the shoulder blades, where it evokes different qualities of ‘touch’. This work offers a detailed account of opening the space of designing with shape-change actuation through a somaesthetic approach to engaging with the body, materials and felt experiences. This rich design-led inquiry that placed the body in dialogue with materials and wearable, challenged the perception of the boundaries between body and wearable by shifting the agency from the human body to a co-living experience between the two.

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.

We report on the design processes of two ongoing soma design projects: the Pelvic Chair and the Breathing Wings. These projects take a first-person, soma design approach, grounded in a holistic perspective of the mind and body (the soma). We contribute a reflective account of our soma design processes that deepens the field’s understanding of how soma design is achieved through first-person approaches. We show how we use our somas, our first-person experiences, to stimulate a design process, to prototype through and to use as a way of critiquing emerging designs. Grounding our analysis in new materialism, we show how our designs are in essence, “performative intra-actions”. Using our own somas, our designs open up for experiences within certain constraints, allowing for a material-discursive agency of sorts. Many different somas may be intra-acted through our designs, even if it was our somas who started them.

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 report on a workshop bringing together researchers working in soma design and sensory misalignment. Creating experiences that make use of sensory misalignment has become increasingly common, often associated with virtual reality research. However, little attention has been paid to how to design such experiences. We argue that the practice of soma design is a relevant candidate method for designing misalignment experiences, since soma design brings with it concepts such as estrangement and disrupting the habitual as a path to design. We further argue that sensory misalignment may in turn extend soma design methods, adding methods for explicitly disrupting sensory perception using technology interventions. Finally, we draw on the findings of that workshop to discuss the ideas of: pluralism in experience; orchestration of overall experience; as well as the broader intersection of soma design and sensory misalignment approaches.

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 this paper, we present the Nebula, a garment that translates intentional gestures and implicit interaction into sound.Nebula is a studded cloak made from a heavy fabric that envelopes the wearer with many pendulous folds. We describe the design process, and specifically highlight three material investigations that show particularly important material connections that were fundamental to the experience of the garment: How the draping and construction of the garment allowed for implicit interaction, how the studs were used both as a computational sensing material and a strong visual component, and how the sound design exploited tangible material qualities in the garment. Finally, we discuss how such material investigations in general can be put to use. Both as a way to produce evocative connections in the materials available in design work, but also as a way to extract legible design intentions for other designers and researchers.

This Studio offers researchers and designers an opportunity to investigate and discuss prototypes and in-process projects from a perspective that expands beyond material aspects, to also cover social and cultural ones. Participants will bring a project, device, or platform, which will be discussed as sociomaterials that actively participate across multiple social and cultural contexts. This perspective, as well as the prototypes and projects brought by the participants, forms the core of the Studio, where conversation will emerge over several phases: from the demonstration of the individual projects as things, to the generation of speculative fictions as to the role and use of these artifacts in the world. Finally, we end with a discussion of infrastructuring and appropriation of the artefacts and their social roles. The themes that will be examined in this Studio are agency, emerging behaviors, embeddedness and design strategies from a sociomaterial perspective of artifacts.

As interactive objects get embedded into different cultural contexts and take on more varied material forms, the relationship between interaction design and crafting practices in the physical domain is becoming increasingly interwoven. In this paper, we present an explorative project that involved intense collaborations between the areas of interaction design and silversmith practice. A main focus of the investigation concerned ways of surfacing conductive metals in interactive artefacts through the making of small, three-dimensional, and close-to-skin sensors. We reflect on insights made during this process, focusing on the challenges of combining the two knowledge areas on a level of materials, tools and techniques. In particular, we discuss qualities that silversmith crafting brings forth that can inform future directions of interaction design in terms of interaction gestalts, design values and hybrid crafting practices, more broadly.

The material foundations of computer systems and interactive technology is a topic that gained an increased interest within the HCI community during the last years. In this paper we discuss this topic through the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi, a philosophy that embraces three basic realities of the material world: 'nothing lasts', 'nothing is finished', and 'nothing is perfect'. We use these concepts to reflect on four unique interactive artefacts, which all in different ways embrace aspects of Wabi-Sabi, in terms of their design gestalt, materiality, but also in terms of use practices. Further, we use our analysis to articulate three high-level principles that may help addressing the long-term realities faced in physical interaction design, and for the design of interactive systems in general.

This paper is an introduction to the "Future IKEA Catalogue", enclosed here as an example of a design fiction produced from a long standing industrial-academic collaboration. We introduce the catalogue here by discussing some of our experiences using design fiction` with companies and public sector bodies, giving some background to the catalogue and the collaboration which produced it. We have found design fiction to be a useful tool to support collaboration with industrial partners in research projects - it provides a way of thinking and talking about present day concepts, and present day constraints, without being overly concerned with contemporary challenges, or the requirements of academic validation. In particular, there are two main aspects of this we will discuss here, aspects that are visible in the enclosed catalogue itself. The first is the potential of design fiction as a sort of 'boundary object' in industry and academic collaboration, and second the role of critique. After this introduction to the paper we enclose the output of our collaboration in the form of the catalogue itself.

Leather is a material used for the making of artifacts ever since early human history, and which can be used also in contemporary design for various types of interactive and electronic products. In this paper, we present a series of small scale explorations of leather, first as skin close interfaces for physical engagement, and secondly in terms of crafting using hand tools and a laser cutter. We reflect on our experiences along these two strands and discuss future possibilities of leather as a rich material for providing new types of interactive experiences. By discussing emerging topics related to traditional crafting processes and contemporary rapid fabrication with this material, we find a great potential of merging such processes and tools for future interaction design settings.

In this studio we explore the design of interactive electronic accessories made from natural materials such as wood, copper, silver, wool and leather. A set of handcrafted sensor components along with easy to use sensor boards that connect with example smartphone software, will be utilized as a toolkit for the studio activities. Participants will, through hands-on activity, create with, learn about and discuss the role of natural materials in the design of wearable interactive designs.