Being Meaningful

A one-size-fits-all design mentality, rooted in objective efficiency, is ubiquitous in our mass-production society. We aim to counter this mindset through the exploration of relevant technology and topics in TEI and other HCI communities, including flexible and organic materials, biodata and biofeedback, e-textiles and material discourse, and soft robotics. These materials are, by nature, adaptable, diverse, and unpredictable, reflecting the plurality of human experiences and inviting a relational dialogue with the material.

We invite practitioners, designers, and researchers who are already engaged in somaesthetic principles and attention to individuality, as well as those who are interested in applying these design focuses to their own work. We will develop design probes with these materials to explore what it means to design for soma-reflective, meaningful relations. Collectively, we will address plurality and individuality, actively rejecting solutionism and objective efficiency. We aim to share experiences, experiment with ideas, and initiate on-going collaborations in order to support each other as a community and become conscious designers of technologies and, therefore, human experience.

The processes and probes developed in this Studio will serve as an experiential manifesto, providing practitioners with tools to deepen their own practices for designing soma-reflective tangible and embodied interaction. The Studio will form the first steps for ongoing collaboration, focusing on bespoke design and curation of meaningful, personal relationships.

Alice C. Haynes, Courtney N. Reed, Charlotte Nordmoen, and Sophie Skach. 2023. Being Meaningful: Weaving Soma-Reflective Technological Mediations into the Fabric of Daily Life. In Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3569009.3571844 (Warsaw, Poland, Feb. 26-March 1, 2023)