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.

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.

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.

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.