Kristina Höök

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor in interaction design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Given its sensory and emotional qualities, food as a rich resource for design has been much explored in Human-Food Interaction research. Besides such positive aspects of food and food experiences, other scholars have focused on problematic and disordered eating, as well as technologies' negative impact on the growing number of people living with th...

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....

As robots enter the messy human world so the vital matter of safety takes on a fresh complexion with physical contact becoming inevitable and even desirable. We report on an artistic-exploration of how dancers, working as part of a multidisciplinary team, engaged in contact improvisation exercises to explore the opportunities and challenges of danc...

We reappraise the idea of colliding with robots, moving from a position that tries to avoid or mitigate collisions to one that considers them an important facet of human interaction. We report on a soma design workshop that explored how our bodies could collide with telepresence robots, mobility aids, and a quadruped robot. Based on our findings, w...

HCI researchers recognize affect and emotion as fundamental parts of human experience however conceptualizing emotions as ineffable, embodied, situated, or culturally bound does not fit within some of the dominant paradigm of Affective computing and emotion AI research focused mostly on recognition and classification of basic emotions. An alternati...

Soma design is intimately entangled with the politics, not only of design itself, but of bodies. We combine perspectives from soma design, political theory, and Sara Ahmed's work The Cultural Politics of Emotions, to develop five political provocations that reflect on the politics of soma design and the possibilities and frictions therein. Inspired...

We present mechanical sympathy as a generative design concept for cultivating somaesthetic relationships with machines and machine-like systems. We identify the qualities of mechanical sympathy using the design case of How to Train your Drone (HTTYD), a unique human-drone research product designed to explore the process by which people discover and...

How To Train Your Drone is a novel human-drone interaction that demonstrates the generative potential of a design metaphor: the umwelt. We describe the concept of the umwelt and detail how we applied it to inform our soma design process, creating an interactive space where somatic understandings between human and drone could emerge. The system was...

In a long-term commitment to designing for the aesthetics of human– drone interactions, we have been troubled by the lack of tools for shaping and interactively feeling drone behaviours. By observing participants in a three-day drone challenge,we isolated components of drones that, if made transparent, could have helped participants better explore...

Attending to emotion can shed light on why recognizing an ethical issue and taking responsibility for it can be so demanding. To examine emotions related to taking or not taking responsibility for ethical action, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 23 individuals working in interaction design and developing AI systems in Scandinavia...

We theoretically develop the ethical positions implicit in somaesthetic interaction design and, using the case study of a water faucet, illustrate our conceptual understanding of ethical sensibilities in design. We apply four lenses -- the felt self, intercorporeal self, socio-cultural and political self, and entangled self -- to show how our selve...

Human connection is essential for our personal well-being and a building block for a well-functioning society. There is a prominent interest in the potential of technology for mediating social con- nection, with a wealth of systems designed to foster the feeling of connection between strangers, friends, and family. By surveying this design landscap...

Emotion has been studied in HCI for two decades, with specific traditions interested in sensing, expressing, transmitting, modelling, experiencing, visualizing, understanding, constructing, regulating, manipulating or adapting to emotion in human-human and human-computer interactions. This CHI 2022 workshop on the Future of Emotion in Human-Compute...

We report on a soma design process, where we designed a novel shape-changing garment—the Soma Corset. The corset integrates sensing and actuation around the torso in tight interaction loops. The design process revealed how boundaries between the garment and the wearer can become blurred, leading to three flavours of cyborg relations. First, through...

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...

As a way to capture a broadly acceptable high-level characterization of design, we focus on the guiding values or ideals of the discipline. We first reason from the notion of engineering interfaces for usability and utility up to the 1990s to the current ideal of designing interfaces for experience and meaning. Next, we identify three recent techni...

Since the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), researchers have asked how intelligent computing systems could interact with and relate to their users and their surroundings, leading to debates around issues of biased AI systems, ML black-box, user trust, user's perception of control over the system, and system´s transpa...

Research in the use of ubiquitous technologies, tracking systems and wearables within mental health domains is on the rise. In recent years, affective technologies have gained traction and garnered the interest of interdisciplinary fields as the research on such technologies matured. However, while the role of movement and bodily experience to affe...

Previous research on musical embodiment has reported that expert performers often regard their instruments as an extension of their body. Not every digital musical instrument seeks to create a close relationship between body and instrument, but even for the many that do, the design process often focuses heavily on technical and sonic factors, with...

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...

First-person research (i.e., research that involves data collection and experiences from the researcher themselves) continues to become a viable addition and, possibly even, alternative to more traditional HCI methods. While we have seen the benefits of using methods such as autoethnography, autobiographical design, and autoethnographical research...

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...

Movement-based interactions are gaining traction, requiring a better understanding of how such expressions are shaped by designers. Through an analysis of an artistic process aimed to deliver a commissioned opera where custom-built drones are performing on stage alongside human performers, we observed the importance of achieving an intercorporeal u...

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...

As a scholarly field, the ACM SIGCHI community maintains a strong focus on conferences as its main outlet for scholarly publication. Historically, this originates in how the field of computer science adopted a conference-centric publication model as well as in the organizational focus of ACM. Lately, this model has become increasingly challenged fo...

In the last decade, the number of articles on HCI and health has increased dramatically. We extracted 139 papers on depression, anxiety and bipolar health issues from 10 years of SIGCHI conference proceedings. 72 of these were published in the last two years. A systematic analysis of this growing body of literature revealed that most innovation hap...

Interaction design that entails a qualitative shift from a symbolic, language-oriented stance to an experiential stance that encompasses the entire design and use cycle. With the rise of ubiquitous technology, data-driven design, and the Internet of Things, our interactions and interfaces with technology are about to change dramatically, incorporat...

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...

Numerous reports and studies point to increasing performance criteria and workplace stress for academics/researchers. Together with the audience, this panel will explore how we experience this in the HCI community, focussing particularly on what we can do to change this for a slower more sustainable academic culture. The future of good quality HCI...

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...

Delete by Haiku is a mobile phone application that explores how deleting old text messages can become an enjoyable and creative practice by turning messages into haiku poetry. Through the application users interactively repurpose selected old text messages on their mobile phone into a haiku poem aided by a haiku-generating algorithm. By repeatedly...

The work draws on repurposing practices to inform design for deletion and handling of digital waste -- a way of letting go -- in graceful and aesthetically appealing ways. Delete by Haiku is a mobile phone application that explores how deleting old text messages can become an enjoyable and creative practice by turning messages into haiku poetry. Th...

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...

This paper is an introduction to the "Future IKEA Catalogue", enclosed here as an example of a design fiction produced from a long standing industrial-academic collaboration. We introduce the catalogue here by discussing some of our experiences using design fiction` with companies and public sector bodies, giving some background to the catalogue an...

Repurposing refers to a broad set of practices, such as recycling or upcycling, all aiming to make better use of or give new life to physical materials and artifacts. While these practices have an obvious interest regarding sustainability issues, they also bring about unique aesthetics and values that may inspire design beyond sustainability concer...

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...

Interaction design (IxD) research cuts through many domains of HCI yet remains distinctive. There are convincing arguments that Research through Design (RtD) is a valid research method in the concerned field. Important to these arguments is how RtD allows IxD researchers to actually do design as an empirical method to gain knowledge, rather than al...

div class="page" title="Page 1"> The value of engaging the full gamut of sensory motor skills in the design and use of smart objects and systems is recognized. Yet methods for arriving at robust and reliable outcomes for their development are not fully understood, nor are they easily reported or transferred through typical conference presentations...

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...

Research in HCI involves a wide variety of knowledge production bringing forth theories, guidelines, methods, practices, design case studies / exemplars, frameworks, concepts, qualities and so on. This workshop is about mapping out the spaces, forms and potentials of such knowledge production in interaction design research.

With The Vocal Chorder, a large interactive instrument to create accompaniment, opera singers can get more power over the performance. The device allows performers to interactively accompany themselves through pushing, leaning on and bending steel wires. The design was guided by the unique needs of the solo-singer, explored through autobiographical...

Interactivity is a unique forum of the ACM CHI Conference that showcases hands-on demonstrations, novel interactive technologies, and artistic installations. At CHI 2014, we aimed to create a "one of a CHInd" Interactivity experience with more than 60 interactive exhibits to highlight the diverse group of computer scientists, sociologists, designer...

There is a growing interest in designing systems for sharing experience through bodily interaction. To explore this design space, we built a probe system we named the Lega. In our 2-month-long research design process, we noted that the users’ attention was set on their own reflective experience, rather than attending to the person(s) with which the...

In this workshop we plan to explore the possibilities and challenges of physical objects and materials for evaluating the User Experience (UX) of interactive systems. These objects should face shortfalls of current UX evaluation methods and allow for a qualitative (or even quantitative), playful and holistic evaluation of UX – without interfering w...

With The Vocal Chorder, a large interactive instrument to create accompaniment, opera singers can get more power over the performance. The device allows performers to interactively accompany themselves through pushing, leaning on and bending steel wires. The design was guided by the unique needs of the solo-singer, explored through autobiographical...

Through our art project, Metaphone, we explored a particular form of aesthetics referred to in the arts tradition as machine aesthetics. The Metaphone machine collects the participant's bio-data, Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) and Heart Rate (HR), creating a process of movement, painting and sound. The machine behaves in machine-like, aesthetically e...

With The Vocal Chorder, a large interactive instrument to create accompaniment, opera singers can get more power over the performance. The device allows performers to interactively accompany themselves through pushing, leaning on, and bending steel wires. The design was guided by the unique needs of the solo-singer, explored through autobiographica...

The goal of this panel is to reflect on the past and discuss the present and future of designing for an experiencing body in HCI. The motivation is to discuss the full range of rich body/movement-based experiences and how the CHI community can embrace and extend these perspectives on designing for the body. The panelists and audience will be asked...

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...

Practitioner-led artistic research, combined with interactive technologies, opens up new and unexplored design spaces. Here we focus on the creation of a tool for opera-singers to dynamically disform, change and accompany their voices. In an opera composed by one of the authors, the title-role singer needed to be able to alter his voice to express...

We believe that it is time to talk about user experience and its theoretical roots as well as about the relationship between theory and practice in UX research. Although user experience is overused as a buzzword, it defines a main step change in the evolvement of the HCI field and deserves a proper (theoretical) attention. Within this panel we foll...

This paper describes the design and evaluation of AffectCam, a wearable system integrating SenseCam and BodyMedia SenseWear for capturing galvanic skin response as a measure of bodily arousal. AffectCam's algorithms use arousal as a filtering mechanism for selecting the most personally relevant photos captured during people's ordinary daily life, i...

The Metaphone is an interactive art piece that transforms biosensor data extracted from participants into colorful, evocative perceivable visual patterns on a big canvas. The biosensors register movement, pulse and skin conductance, the latter two relating to emotional arousal. The machine creates a traditional art form colorful paintings which can...

Creativity refers to the human processes that underpin sublime forms of expression and fuel innovation. Creativity support environments (CSEs) address diverse areas, such as education, science, business, disaster response, design, art, performance, and everyday life. A CSE may consist of a desktop application, or use specialized hardware, networked...

Research on and with digital technologies is everywhere today. This timely, authoritative Handbook explores the issues of rapid technological development, social change, and the ubiquity of computing technologies which have become an integrated part of people's everyday lives. This is a comprehensive, up-to-date resource for the twenty-first centur...