This one-day workshop seeks to bring together design researchers that have different orientations and practices for futures and futuring to unpack the role of futuring across design, design artefacts, and designers. Our goal in this workshop is to use examples of established futures to engage with and reflect on questions around the role of futures in HCI/design. We believe that there is a common thread between work from many different researchers, but that the people doing that work are spread across different disciplines and geographical locations. To that end, this workshop will assemble researchers working with different methods and approaches to futures in design and will aim to identify core challenges and opportunities for futures in HCI.

Collision, "the violent encounter of a moving body with another", is poorly understood in HCI. When we discuss people colliding with the physical artifacts we create, or colliding with each other while using our systems, this is primarily treated as a hazard, something which we should design to avoid. However many other human activities involve situations where deliberate exposure to risk of collision may in fact have positive aspects. In this paper we discuss how the ’risk matrix’, a widely used risk-management tool, which categorizes risks in terms of likelihood and severity, may limit interaction in unintended ways. We discuss reframings of this matrix in relation to design concepts of ’adventure’, ’disempowerment/agency’ and ’consent’. and show that a range of design spaces for collisions exist which may be fruitful to explore.

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 acomplex bodily function. Problematising the space of designing forbreathing as a non-habitual act pertaining to diferent bodies orsituations, we conducted a soma design exploration together with aclassical singer. Refecting on how sensors could capture the impactand somatic experience of being sensed led us to develop a newsensing mechanism using shape-change technologies integrated inthe Breathing Shell: a wearable that evokes a reciprocal experienceof “feeling the sensor feeling you” when breathing. We contributewith two design implications: 1) Enabling refections of the somaticimpact 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 somarelates to or with biosensors and ultimately leading to designingfor symbiotic experiences between biosensors and bodies.

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.

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.

Previous research on musical embodiment has reported that expert performers often regard their instruments as an extension of their body. Not every digital musical instrument seeks to create a close relationship between body and instrument, but even for the many that do, the design process often focuses heavily on technical and sonic factors, with relatively less attention to the bodily experience of the performer. In this paper we propose soma design as an alternative approach to explore this space. Soma method aims to attune the sensibilities of designers, as well as their experience of their body, and make use of these notions as a resource for creative aesthetic design. We report on a series of workshops exploring the relationship between the body and the guitar with a soma design approach. The workshops resulted in a series of guitar-related artefacts and NIMEs that emerged from the somatic exploration of balance and tension during guitar performance. Lastly we present lessons learned from our research that could inform future Soma-based musical instrument design, and how NIME research may also inform soma design. 

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.

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 pendulous folds and has strong experiential qualities that were especially appreciated by performing artists. We describe the design process in detail, and highlight three material investigations that show 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. We offer these three material investigations as contributions and discuss how material investigations more broadly can 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.