Anna Ståhl

• Ph D
• Senior Researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

Body maps are visual documents, where somatic experiences can be drawn onto a graphical representation of an outline of the human body. They hold the ability to capture complex and non-explicit emotions and somatic felt sensations, elaborating narratives that cannot be simply spoken. We present an illustrative example of “how-to” complete a body ma...

We report on the design processes of two ongoing soma design projects: the Pelvic Chair and the Breathing Wings. These projects take a first-person, soma design approach, grounded in a holistic perspective of the mind and body (the soma). We contribute a reflective account of our soma design processes that deepens the field’s understanding of how s...

We report on a somaesthetic design workshop and the subsequent analytical work aiming to demystify what is entailed in a non-dualistic design stance on embodied interaction and why a first-person engagement is crucial to its unfoldings. However, as we will uncover through a detailed account of our process, these first-person engagements are deeply...

We reflect back on a previous paper writing process, where we initially set out to share experiences of forest walks and discuss how these were part of a design process for an application around sustainable grocery shopping. We describe our inability in finding a working way of articulating the experiences and the design process led us into route o...

Human reasoning often revolves around dichotomies: male-female, rational-irrational, emotion-thinking, body-mind, white-black, and so on. Through our design processes, we often repeat and reinforce these patterns. We argue that a stronger somatic engagement with the digital materials might open the design space in different manners, thereby bypassi...

Skin conductance is an interesting measure of arousal level, largely unfamiliar to most end-users. We designed a mobile application mirroring end-users’ skin conductance in evocative visualizations, purposefully made ambiguous to invite rich interpretations. Twenty-three participants used the system for a month. Through the lens of a practice-based...

We devised a Soma Design curriculum with accompanying teaching approaches for a seven-week course at a technical university. In our analysis of students' design concepts and process accounts, we found that they had opened an unusually rich and aesthetically engaging design space. But we also noted how they sometimes struggled with processes such as...

The Soma Bits are a prototyping toolkit that facilitates Soma Design. Acting as an accessible 'sociodigital material' Soma Bits allow designers to pair digital technologies, with their whole body and senses, as part of an iterative soma design process. The Soma Bits addresses the difficulty we experienced in past Soma Design processes-that articula...

Experience Centered Design (ECD) implores us to develop empathic relationships and understanding of participants, to actively work with our senses and emotions within the design process. However, theories of experience-centered design do little to account for emotion work undertaken by design researchers when doing this. As a consequence, how a des...

Interaction design research has broadened its focus from settings in which people would sit more or less still in front of static computers doing their work tasks, to instead thriving off new interactive materials, mobile use, and ubiquitously available data of all sorts, creating interactions everywhere. These changes have put into question such a...

With advanced technologies and raised expectations for the quality of life, research and design attempts are increasing to promote wellbeing. While data-based reflective practice and behaviour change have been a main strategy in supporting technology-mediated wellbeing, we bring the perspectives of somaesthetic practice and fashion design to comple...

A set of prominent designers embarked on a research journey to explore aesthetics in movement-based design. Here we unpack one of the design sensitivities unique to our practice: a strong first person perspective—where the movements, somatics and aesthetic sensibilities of the designer, design researcher and user are at the forefront. We present an...

We articulate and reflect on the use of nature as a sketching material. We have closely documented explorations of various organic and non-organic materials found during excursions in a local forest and how we used them as resources in sketching. This serves as an exemplar case of how sketching in interaction design can be grounded in empirical exp...

Movement-based interaction design is increasingly popular, with application domains ranging from dance, sport, gaming to physical rehabilitation. In a workshop at CHI 2016, a set of prominent artists, game design-ers, and interaction designers embarked on a research journey to explore what we came to refer to as "aesthetics in soma-based design". I...

We propose a strong concept we name Somaesthetic Appreciation based on three different enquiries. First, our own autobiographical design enquiry, using Feldenkrais as a resource in our design process, bringing out the Soma Carpet and Breathing Light applications. Second, through bringing in others to experience our systems, engaging with and qualit...

We present the experience of using the prototypes Soma Mat and Breathing Light. These are designed with a somaesthetic approach to support a meditative bodily introspection. We use light and heat as modalities to subtly guide participants to turn their gaze inwards, to their own bodies. People trying our prototypes reports on a feeling of relaxatio...

Movement-based design is reaching critical mass in HCI, and we can start to identify strategies, similarities and differences in how it is approached. Similarities may include, for example, a strong first person perspective on design, emphasising movement, somatics and aesthetic sensibilities of the designer, as well as starting from the premise th...

Movement-based design is reaching critical mass in HCI, and we can start to identify strategies, similarities and differences in how it is approached. Similarities may include, for example, a strong first person perspective on design, emphasising movement, somatics and aesthetic sensibilities of the designer, as well as starting from the premise th...

In this paper we discuss the design process and results from a design exploration on the use of thermal stimuli in body awareness exercises. A user-study was performed on an interactive prototype in the form of an interactive heat mat. The paper brings forth an alternative understanding of heat as a design material that extends the common understan...

Somaesthetics is an interdisciplinary field, originally proposed by the philosopher Richard Shusterman and grounded in pragmatist philosophy and phenomenology. An interesting result of engaging in Feldenkrais exercises was the effect on the whole beings. After a lesson, all students felt they had become more honest, more grounded in themselves, mor...

This thesis further defines how to reach Interactional Empowerment through design for users. Interactional Empowerment is an interaction design program within the general area of affective interaction, focusing on the users’ ability to reflect, express themselves and engage in profound meaning-making. This has been explored through design of three...

We propose an experiential quality called evocative balance as key in designing for affective interaction that aims to empower users in and through the interaction. Evocative balance draws on the dual meaning of the word “evoke” in characterizing the user’s sense that data and actions evoke familiar recollections of lived experience, yet are still...

The Ecofriends application was designed to encourage people to reflect on their everyday grocery shopping from social and ecological perspectives. Ecofriends portrays the seasonality of various grocery products as being socially constructed, emphasizing subjective dimensions of what it means for a product to be in season, rather than attempting to...

In the Affective Health project we explore possibilities of how to, through biofeedback support users in making sense of the relationship between their stress and their behavior in everyday life. Affective Health is a tool for visualizing patterns and trends of bodily and contextual information. It is particularly important that the design reflects...

A diary is generally considered to be a book in which one keeps a regular record of events and experiences that have some personal significance. As such, it provides a useful means to privately express inner thoughts or to reflect on daily experiences, helping in either case to put them in perspective. Taking conventional diary keeping as our start...

Affective Diary is a digital diary that makes use of bio-sensors to add some reminiscence of bodily experiences. The design process behind Affective Diary was 'sensitive' to three design qualities extracted from a previous project; providing cues of emotional expressivity building on familiarity, making the design open for personal expressivity and...

We propose that an interactional perspective on how emo- tion is constructed, shared and experienced, may be a good basis for designing affective interactional systems that do not infringe on privacy or autonomy, but instead em powers users. An interactional design perspective may make use of design elements such as open-ended, ambiguous, yet famil...

A growing trend in the field is the development of experience-focused HCI, which emphasizes the experience of using the technology, rather than the focus on the task that is characteristic of many other approaches HCI. A focus on experience also means that research concentrating on such technologies produces a different kind of knowledge than task-...

We have designed and built a mobile emotional messaging system named eMoto. With it, users can compose messages through using emotion-signalling gestures as input, rendering a message background of colours, shapes and animations expressing the emotional content. The design intent behind eMoto was that it should be engaging physically, intellectuall...

A diary provides a useful means to express inner thoughts and record experien ces of past events. In re- readings, it also provides a resource for reflection, al- lowing us to re-experience, brood over or even shed the thoughts and feelings we've associated with events or people. To expand on th e ways in which we crea- tively engage in diary-keepi...

In our daily lives we communicate emotions not only in face-to-face situations, but also in the digital world. When communicating emotions to other people we are not always aware of exactly what we are expressing. Emotions are communicated not only by the actual words we say, but through physical expressions like gestures, body posture and tone of...

Name and full contact address (surface, fax, email) of the individual responsible for submitting and receiving inquiries about the submission: Anna Ståhl, SICS, Box 1263, SE-164 29, Kista, Sweden, +46(0)8 6331580, annas@sics.se

We have built eMoto, a mobile service for sending and receiving af- fective messages, with the explicit aim of addressing the inner experience of emotions. eMoto is a designed artifact that carries emotional experiences only achieved through interaction. Following on the theories of embodiment, we ar- gue emotional experiences can not be design in...

It is known that emotions are experienced by both body and mind. Oftentimes, emotions are evoked by sub-symbolic stimuli, such as colors, shapes, gestures, or music. We have built eMoto, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others, with the explicit aim of addressing such sensing. Through combining affective gestures for input with af...

The eMoto is an emotional text messaging service built on top of a SonyEricsson P900 mobile terminal. The goal of this service is to provide users with means to emotionally enhance their SMS messages. The user first writes the textual content of the message and then adjusts the affective background to fit the emotional expression she wants to achie...

We discuss a user-centered approach to incorporating affective expressions in interactive applications, and argue for a design that addresses both body and mind. In particular, we have studied the problem of finding a set of affective gestures. Based on previous work in movement analysis and emotion theory (Davies, Laban and Lawrence, Russell), and...