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.

We present a novel intercorporeal experience – an intersubjective haptic voice. Through an autobiographical design inquiry, based on singing techniques from the classical opera tradition, we created Corsetto, a kinesthetic garment for transferring somatic reminiscents of vocal experience from an expert singer to a listener. We then composed haptic gestures enacted in the Corsetto, emulating upper-body movements of the live singer performing a piece by Morton Feldman named Three Voices. The gestures in the Corsetto added a haptics-based ‘fourth voice’ to the immersive opera performance. Finally, we invited audiences who were asked to wear Corsetto during live performances. Afterwards they engaged in micro-phenomenological interviews. The analysis revealed how the Corsetto managed to bridge inner and outer bodily sensations, creating a feeling of a shared intercorporeal experience, dissolving boundaries between listener, singer and performance. We propose that ‘intersubjective haptics’ can be a generative medium not only for singing performances, but other possible intersubjective experiences.

The goal of this studio is to explore the qualities of unhabitual body movements to inform the design of close-to-the-body touch technologies. After engaging with unhabitual kinesthetic activities, we will use visual and textual elicitation tools to communicate emerging felt sensations. We propose the use of photography as an open-ended visual medium and a repertoire of textural metaphors as a textual tool - a vocabulary list of felt qualities that will be extended through the participants’ contribution. We will then collectively explore how these expressions of felt sensations can be translated into concrete design elements via tangible design ideation and making.  

We theoretically develop the ethical positions implicit in somaesthetic interaction design and, using the case study of a water faucet, illustrate our conceptual understanding of ethical sensibilities in design. We apply four lenses – the felt self, intercorporeal self, socio-cultural and political self, and entangled self – to show how our selves and ethical sensibilities are fundamentally constituted by a socially, materially, and technologically entwined world. Further, we show how ethical sensibilities are cultivated in the practice of somaesthetic interaction design. We contribute felt ethics as an approach to cultivating ethical sensibilities in design practice. The felt ethics approach is comprised of (i) a processual cultivation of ethical sensibility through analytical, pragmatic, and practical engagement, (ii) an ongoing critical attentiveness to the limits of our own bodies and lived experiences, and (iii) the rendering visible of our ethical practices as a matter of care.

As interaction designers are venturing to design for others based on autobiographical experiences, it becomes particularly relevant to critically distinguish the designer’s voice from others’ experiences. However, few reports go into detail about how self and others mutually shape the design process and how to incorporate external evaluation into these designs. We describe a one-year process involving the design and evaluation of a prototype combining haptics and storytelling, aiming to materialise and share somatic memories of earthquakes experienced by a designer and her partner. We contribute with three strategies for bringing others into our autobiographical processes, avoiding the dilution of frst-person voices while critically addressing design faws that might hinder the representation of our stories. 

Attending to the need to integrate somatic sensibilities into design education, this paper provides a walkthrough of a workshop activity devoted to introducing Gestalt laws through the cultivation of somatic sensibility. Instead of following a solely visually-oriented path to learning Gestalt laws, students were asked to use their senses and materials as vehicles to represent their felt, inner experience through their designs. By applying the proposed steps, it was observed that certain patterns of responses reporting on movement, intensity, and dissipation of awareness were associated with specific Gestalt laws. This article reports on the first approximations of this approach, suggesting future paths for design educators, such as the integration of both constraints and whole-body interactions with materials as students increase their somatic sensibility.

Body maps are visual documents, where somatic experiences can be drawn onto a graphical representation of an outline of the human body. They hold the ability to capture complex and non-explicit emotions and somatic felt sensations, elaborating narratives that cannot be simply spoken. We present an illustrative example of “how-to” complete a body map, together with four case studies that provide examples of using body maps in design research. We identify five uses of body maps as generative tools for soma-based design, ranging from sampling bodily experience, heightening bodily self-awareness, understanding changing bodily experience over time, identifying patterns of bodily experience, and transferring somatic experiential qualities into physical designs. The different requirements for scaffolding the use of body maps in user-centred design versus first-person autobiographical design research are discussed. We provide this Pictorial as a resource for designers and researchers who wish to integrate body maps into their practice.

Research on Accessible Digital Musical Instruments (ADMIs) has highlighted the need for participatory design methods, i.e., to actively include users as co-designers and informants in the design process. However, very little work has explored how pre-verbal children with Profound and Multiple Disabilities (PMLD) can be involved in such processes. In this paper, we apply in-depth qualitative and mixed methodologies in a case study with four students with PMLD. Using Participatory Design with Proxies (PDwP), we assess how these students can be involved in the customization and evaluation of the design of a multisensory music experience intended for a large-scale ADMI. Results from an experiment focused on communication of musical haptics highlighted the diversity in employed interaction strategies used by the children, accessibility limitations of the current multisensory experience design, and the importance of using a multifaceted variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to arrive at more informed conclusions when applying a design with proxies methodology.

Cultivating somatic sensibilities involves heightening our sensory appreciation as a path to devise meaningful multisensory experiences in interaction design. Immersed in an increasingly digitalized and data-cen-tric world, research projects centering on the sensory, embodied, and material reality of our experience, might start losing momentum. On the other hand, the pandemic has also transferred our labs from the public nature of our workshop room to the intimacy of our homes, bringing unexpected benefits and challenges. The articles included in this issue center on the sensory and material experiences of designers, who work with design methods that foreground somatic modes of inquiry and show how these changes could open a door for new opportunities to emphasize the importance of embodied and somatic practices in design and HCI.

Through this pictorial, I propose a generative method for the elicitation of autoethnographic themes for design research. This dialogue with tangible traces uses photography in conversation with tangible body maps (TBMs) towards harvesting evocative content for exploration. This dialogical tool functions as a way of generating conceptual knowledge inspired by the self and environment, including other subjectivities. This dialogue with tangible traces contributes to first-person design research, where traceability and communicability of outcomes become necessary preconditions for rigour. Although systematic, this method also respects the non-prescriptive and drifting nature of design.