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?

How To Train Your Drone (HTTYD) is a novel, embodied human-drone interaction demonstration that enables an individual to shape the mapping between a drone and their own body. By demonstrating this system we aim to give conference attendees the opportunity to, not only shape their own interactions with a drone, but to experience being shaped by it. We hope this demonstration inspires researchers to build systems that allow for this kind of mutual shaping. We believe that supporting such interactions is vital to real world deployments of robots as they leverage embodied ways that people can understand robots, their environments, and the people around them.

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.

Friction - disagreement and breakdown - is an omnipresent aspect of conducting interdisciplinary research yet is rarely presented in formal research reporting. We analyse a performance-led research process where professional dancers with different disabilities explored how to improvise with an industrial robot, with the support of an interdisciplinary team of human-computer and human-robot interaction researchers. We focus on one site of friction in our research process; how to dance - safely - with robots? By presenting our research process, we exemplify the different ways in which we encountered this friction and how we reconfigured the research process around it. We contribute five ways in which we arrived at a generative ethical outcome, which may be helpful in productively engaging with friction in interdisciplinary collaboration.

Glitches moments when technologies do not work as desired will become increasingly common as industrially-designed robots move into complex contexts. Taking glitches to be potential sites of critical ethical reflection, we examine a glitch that occurred in the context of a collaborative research project where professional dancers with different disabilities improvised with a robotic arm. Through a first-person account, we analyse how the dancer, the robot, and the rest of the research team enacted ethics in the moment of glitch. Through this analysis, we discovered a deep and implicit ethical misalignment wherein our enactments of ethics in response to the glitch did not align with the values of the project. This prompted a critical re-engagement with our research process through which we forged a dialogue between different ethical perspectives that acted as an invitation to bring us back into ethical alignment with the projects values.

Given its sensory and emotional qualities, food as a rich resource for design has been much explored in Human-Food Interaction research. Besides such positive aspects of food and food experiences, other scholars have focused on problematic and disordered eating, as well as technologies’ negative impact on the growing number of people living with these conditions. Drawing from mindfulness-based interventions, health research has explored effective interventions for mindful eating, which however have been limitedly harnessed in interaction design, despite the growing body of HCI research on mindfulness technologies emphasizing also the role of the human body in mindfulness practices. This half-day workshop aims to address this gap, by bringing together designers, practitioners, and HCI researchers from human-food interaction, mindfulness, and somaesthetics to explore the design space of technologies for mindful eating interventions, with a focus on five goals targeting (i) support for the role of the body in mindful eating, (ii) design exploration of technologies supporting mindful eating interventions, (iii) develop theoretical and methodological foundations for designing for mindful eating, (iv) explore ethical aspects of designing for mindful eating interventions, and (v) position mindful eating technology-based interventions within a broader, more sustainable food cycle.

As robots enter the messy human world so the vital matter of safety takes on a fresh complexion with physical contact becoming inevitable and even desirable. We report on an artistic-exploration of how dancers, working as part of a multidisciplinary team, engaged in contact improvisation exer-cises to explore the opportunities and challenges of dancing with cobots. We reveal how they employed their honed bodily senses and physical skills to engage with the robots aesthetically and yet safely, interleaving improvised physical manipulations with reflections to grow their knowledge of how the robots behaved and felt. We introduce somatic safety, a holistic mind-body approach in which safety is learned, felt and enacted through bodily contact with robots in addition to being reasoned about. We conclude that robots need to be better designed for people to hold them and might recognise tacit safety cues among people. We propose that safety should be learned through iterative bodily experience interleaved with reflection.

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.

We present mechanical sympathy as a generative design concept for cultivating somaesthetic relationships with machines and machine-like systems. We identify the qualities of mechanical sympathy using the design case of How to Train your Drone (HTTYD), a unique human-drone research product designed to explore the process by which people discover and co-create the somaesthetic potential of drones. We articulate the qualities – (i) machine-agency, (ii) oscillations, and (iii) aesthetic pursuits – by using descriptive and reflective accounts of our design strategies and of our co-creators engaging with the system. We also discuss how each quality can extend soma design research; conceptualizing of appreciative, temporal, and idiosyncratic relationships with machines that can complement technical learning and enrich human-machine interaction. Finally, we ground our concept in a similar selection of works from across the HCI community.

Soma design processes are known to be slow and thoughtful, demanding personal engagement, authenticity and deep somatic engagements with both ourselves and the interactive materials. What happens when such designerly ways of knowing meet with industrial design thinking? Together with IKEA – a large furniture manufacturer – we collaborated to design for better sleep. Based on years of experience and prior somatic knowledge of designing for body awareness, the academic team staged a progression of somatic experiences for a joint one-day workshop. We contribute to interaction design epistemology by uncovering frictions and alignments between two designerly ways of knowing with distinct identities and values. In particular, we critically reflect on how to approach material choices, somatic cultivation and the notion of solutionism.