Our bodies mediate every interaction with technology, yet - as soma design and feminist HCI remind us - the body is not a neutral canvas. We introduce and examine felt asymmetries - somaesthetic experiences of difference in the body - as a site for generative and critical engagement in interaction design. Through an autobiographical design exploration, and a series of somatic explorations with nine designers including individual inquiries and workshops, we sensitised to, articulated, and shared personal experiences of asymmetry. We draw from these explorations to contribute: (1) Opening a design space exploring the aesthetics of felt asymmetries; (2) Reflections on engaging with asymmetry in design, e.g. as a design material, an estrangement activity or doorway into intimate experience; (3) Considerations for creating technologies that resonate with, rather than erase, the asymmetries of lived experience. We argue that bodily asymmetries are not only to be accommodated in design, but embraced as aesthetic resources - sources of joy, tension, and creativity.

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.

HCI and design research frequently engage with vulnerability in contexts of care, health, and life transitions, yet often overlooks how vulnerability is sensed and enacted through the body. This one-day workshop foregrounds vulnerability as an embodied phenomenon that unfolds in interaction, prior to and beyond language. Participants explore vulnerability through shared experiential inquiry: Through carefully facilitated embodied activities, collective reflection, and methodological experimentation, participants will attend to embodied, sensory, and relational experiences of vulnerability in their own research practices. The workshop offers a safe, ethically attentive space in which participants experiment with translating non-verbal experiences into communicable forms such as sketches, body-maps or material traces that can inform design inquiry. We aim to cultivate a shared vocabulary, methodological sensibilities and practical techniques for engaging embodied vulnerability in design research, and lay the foundations for ongoing community building around care-oriented approaches in HCI and design.

Touch is a powerful way of connecting with others, yet remains elusive in mediated interaction. Embodied Telepresent Connection (ETC), a VR artwork, offers a unique experience of virtual touch through pseudo-haptics, ethereal aesthetics and subtle biosignals. Unlike approaches that strive to mimic physical tactility, ETC explores touch as an ephemeral and socially meaningful phenomenon. Through soma design-inspired workshops with 14 HCI experts and public exhibitions with 300+ participants, we observed a palette of experiences ranging from play to intimacy, shaped by illusions of pseudo-haptic touch and their embedded social meaning. We contribute: (1) the design material of ethereal virtual touch, expanding the design space of mediated touch, and (2) design insights for cultivating embodied social connection in VR through attention to bodies, aesthetics, and emergent ethics. ETC demonstrates how even ethereal forms of social touch in virtual reality can evoke experiences reminiscent of the real-world analogue, yet form a distinct felt phenomenon offering novel opportunities for supporting genuine human connection.

While engaging with four different wearable systems, we unexpectedly encountered felt experiences that resisted articulation and defied conventional classification. They were neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and yet both; neither comforting nor frightening, and yet both; neither recognizably human-like nor machinic, and yet both. Such ambiguous experiences might have gone unnoticed had we not attended to their somatic, felt dimensions. Existing user experience frameworks offered little guidance in making sense of these phenomena. However, through the lens of monster theory, these paradoxical experiences began to reveal their structure and significance. Drawing on concepts such as fusion, fission, massification, and incompleteness, we analyze and interpret the unexpected monstrous experiences arising from interacting with wearable systems. We argue that such experiences deserve a place in interaction design: not only for the enduring fascination of the monster, but also for its power to disrupt simplistic schemas, enrich design possibilities, and illuminate cultural shifts.

Methods for understanding the felt and situated experience of controlling autonomous systems are crucial for designing systems that are adjusted to the complexity of human interaction. Prior work has tended to overlook the bodily and experiential dimensions of monitoring systems at a distance, particularly in moments of losing control. We combined two approaches, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and soma design, to explore a case where a semi-autonomous system crashed when controlled by an inexperienced operator, captured in video ethnographic fieldwork. We report on our methodological approach, combining sequential video analysis of the unfolding sequence and interviews inspired by microphenomenology to unpack the operator's experience of losing control. We contribute methodological considerations for interaction designers seeking to explore the felt experience of having and losing control of autonomous systems and discuss how insights gained through this combination of methods, rooted in phenomenology, support a designerly appreciation of safety operators' work.

This meet-up will bring together researchers and practitioners interested in the timely intersection of neuroscience and human-computer interaction (NeuroHCI). Advances in performance and accessibility of methods such as EEG, fNIRS, BCIs, and biosensing open new possibilities for design and interaction while also raising conceptual, technical, and ethical challenges. The session will employ engaging, interactive activities to maximize dialog, including an exercise that invites participants to experience embodied approaches to interaction. Our goal is to catalyze interdisciplinary collaboration, strengthen and grow the NeuroHCI community, and identify promising directions for future research and practice.

The proposed discussion centers on the somatic core of ideation within creative processes, drawing on diverse perspectives from Somaesthetics, Embodied Design Theory, Interaction Design and Design Education, Embodied Learning, the Hermeneutics of Play, Child Development and the Neuro-Evolutionary Foundations of Infant Minds. We suggest a virtual open dialogue, grounded in the participants’ pedagogical and academic expertise in facilitating ideation. A pre-structured set of topics aims to facilitate a coherent and focused discourse while allowing space for spontaneous exchange. Key topics include:

What is the deeper connection between self-agency and self-regulation in ideation processes?How does early neuro-affective development shape the ability to perceive and create specific aesthetics?What are key mind-body interconnections in ideation, and how are they linked to the somatic dimension of long-term Gestalt processes?

HCI is increasingly shaped by technologies that transform how people perceive, inhabit, and act with their bodies. Decades of research across psychology, neuroscience, somaesthetics, and HCI show that bodily experience is flexible and continually shifting, and that sensory, material, and computational interventions can open new ways of perceiving, sensing, moving, acting, and making sense of and with your body. As these transformations enter everyday life-through shape-changing wearables, computational textiles, sensory-augmentation devices, and immersive mixed reality-a central challenge emerges: how might designers support sustainable Body Transformation Experiences that matter without assuming change must be linear, lasting, or predictable? This panel brings together HCI experts with distinct yet complementary perspectives to examine what "sustainability" means for transformative body technologies. Bridging empirical science, somaesthetic design, material innovation, and VR research, the panel explores four themes-Experience, Materiality, Everyday Integration, and Ethics/Politics-to articulate pathways for technologies that support meaningful, inclusive, ethically-grounded transformations of embodied experience.

HCI researchers recognize affect and emotion as fundamental parts of human experience however conceptualizing emotions as ineffable, embodied, situated, or culturally bound does not fit within some of the dominant paradigm of Affective computing and emotion AI research focused mostly on recognition and classification of basic emotions. An alternative term, Affective Interaction, has emerged to bring together a growing body of research which treats emotion and affect within HCI in similar ways. This workshop brings the research community together to examine various perspectives on affect, and specifically contrast Affective Interaction with Affective Computing. The aim is to discuss opportunities and limitations associated with each perspective, reconcile with advances in the science of emotion, and to speculate on future research directions. We believe that bringing together HCI researchers around Affective Interaction is vitally important because the broad reach of Affective Computing techniques may be obscuring advances in emotion research that show evidence that emotion defies easy categories and is culturally situated.