Soma design is intended to increase our ability to appreciate through all our senses and lead to more meaningful interactions with the world. We contribute a longer-term study of soma design that shows evidence of this promise. Using storytelling approaches we draw on qualitative data from a three-month study of the soma mat and breathing light in four households. We tell stories of people's becomings in the world as they learn of new possibilities for their somas; and as their somas transform. We show how people drew on their somaesthetic experiences with the prototypes to find their way through troubled times; and how through continued engagement some felt compelled to make transformations in how they live their lives. We discuss the implications for the overarching soma design program, focusing on what is required to design for ways of leading a better life.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3502018
Attending to the challenges of describing first-person experience, this article illustrates different uses of the Focusing method in interaction design and HCI, offering a systematic way of accessing the subtle qualities of lived experiences for design use. In this approach, the implicit bodily knowledge -or felt sense- becomes the material capture of aesthetic experiences used to inform data collection, ideation and prototyping. We offer a high-level, yet systematic coverage of Focusing applied to two case studies, informing both a set of instructions to use the method and a series of design considerations to adopt this understudied tool of introspection in interaction design research and practice.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501978
We articulate vulnerability as an ethical stance in soma design processes and discuss the conditions of its emergence. We argue that purposeful vulnerability – an act of taking risk, exposing oneself, and resigning part of one’s autonomy – is a necessary although often neglected part of design, and specifically soma design, which builds on felt experience and stimulates designers to engage with the non-habitual by challenging norms, habitual movements, and social interactions. With the help of ethnography, video analysis, and micro-phenomenological interviews, we document an early design exploration around drones, describing how vulnerability is accomplished in collaboration between members of the design team and the design materials. We (1) define vulnerability as an active ethical stance; (2) make vulnerability visible as a necessary but often neglected part of an exploratory design process; and (3) discuss the conditions of its emergence, demonstrating the importance of deliberating ethics within the design process.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501994
Distracting mobile notifications are a high-profile problem but previous research suggests notification management tools are underused because of the barriers users face in relation to the perceived benefits. We posit that users might be more motivated to personalize if they could view contextual data for how personalizations would have impacted their recent notifications. We propose the ‘Reflective Spring Cleaning’ approach to support notification management through infrequent personalization with visualization of collected notification data. To simplify and contextualize key trends in a user's notifications, we framed these visualizations within a novel who-what-when data abstraction. We evaluated it through a four-week longitudinal study: 21 participants logged their notifications before and after a personalization session that included suggestions for notification management contextualized against visualizations of their recent notifications. A debriefing interview described their new experience after two more weeks of logging. Our approach encouraged users to critically reflect on their notifications, which frequently inspired them to personalize and improved the experience of the majority.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517493