Hi. My name is Anna Ståhl, and I'm from Research Institutes of Sweden,
and I'm going to present the paper Validity and Rigor
in Soma Design - Sketching with the Soma
and this paper
reports on work done in collaboration with the Vasiliki Tsaknaki at the IT
University of Copenhagen and Madeline Balaam, Royal
Institute of Technology .
So let me just shortly introduce the design projects the work centers around .
Both projects use shape-changing, custom made air pumped
latex pocketss that interact with our bodies through touch.
The two designs were made in parallel processes,
but the Pelvic Chair was led by Anna and Madeline
while the Breathing Wings were led by Vasiliki.
The Pelvic Chair is intended to create
an awareness around your pelvis and pelvic floor area through touch
so that you can learn how to make use of it in daily situations.
The Breathing Wings, on the other hand, puts attention and awareness
to an often forgotten part of our body, the upper back.
Both projects used.
a soma design approach, which includes designing from a first-person perspective.
Through our work here, we contribute with reflective accounts of our processes,
which deepens the understanding of how a soma design approach
is achieved through first-person approaches.
By turning to new materialism we discuss how our designs allow
for material discursive agency of sorts, allowing for many different
somas to become with our designs - even if they really
were started by us.
Soma design
is a design approach for new digital materials
that allow us to shape interactions with users' aesthetic experiences.
It suggests some design tactics
to engage with bodily practices
to work with the social digital material, which includes both the material
we design with, but also to engage with our bodies.
It sees our bodies as moldable
and to work from
a first - perspective in an iterative manner.
And this doesn't exclude then second or third person
perspectives.
Through our previous experience
with using a soma design approach together with these two parallel design
processes, we analyzed the processes and found some common traits,
and here we mapped out four anchor points;
in anchor point one, we become sensitized through tuning in to our somas;
in anchor point two, we establish a red thread,
something that opens up the design space and can be guiding in the experiences
we are after through the use of experiential qualities;
in anchor point three, we sketch with our somas and the materials;
and finally in anchor point four, we invite others into the same process.
And of course, this is not mirroring the reality, where a design process is
messy and moved back and forth and things happen in parallel .
So in our design processes then, how did we become sensitized?
Anna and Madeline invited a Feldenkrais practitioner specialized
in the pelvis and pelvic floor area to do exercises.
In Feldenkrais, we seek to break habitual ways
of doing movements and instead look for alternatives.
We documented our
experiences on body maps before and after these exercises.
And Vasiliki engaged in both
Feldenkrais and Contact Improvization, where touch and movement
is used to become attentive to different body parts.
Vasiliki is also invited Anna to touch her
shoulder blades and later trace the outline of them,
which made Vasiliki attentive of the three dimensional shape and form.
A thick description of this is shared in the paper.
We then continued
into constructing experiential qualities
where Anna and Madeline discussed how their body maps
discussed their body
maps and notes, and constructed a set of experiential qualities
that they wanted their design experience to hold.
While Vasiliki chose to use
estrangement methods
by wearing a pair of wireframe textile wings to further articulate
how touch was experienced on her upper back
and this helped her to formulate her experiential qualities.
Next, these
experiential qualities were used in guiding our design
decisions in our respective processes in an iterative manner
where each new iteration or idea had to be experienced.
This was done through somatic design judgments through our pelvic floors
or shoulder blades to see if the quality we aimed for
was captured.
The next step, when we knew we had to put an effort
into our designs actually holding the experience,we sought,
we invited others into a similar process.
With this work done during the pandemic, we turned to each other.
But later we have opened up for others to do soma
sketching with us.
So, let us return to the validity
and rigor of using first-person methods in soma design.
Rigor can here be shown in our detailed descriptions of soma design processes,
and this makes them become accessible
for critique and examination by others.
We also show how a first-person experience is focal in the whole Soma
design process and where rigor comes through our somatic design judgments.
Here we lean on how rigor is discussed within design research
as judgments, reflections-in -action
and desigerly knowing.
Instead of aiming for validity through generalizability,
we discuss the generative power of the plurality
of experience that can become through our designs.
Here, we turn to the work by Karen Barad,
where we ourselves are
becoming in intra.-actions
and following this, our designs generate experiences -
instead of aiming for one specific experience.
Thank you all very much for listening.