“Feeling the Sensor Feeling you”: A Soma Design Exploration on Sensing Non-habitual Breathing

Abstract

Though seemingly straightforward and habitual, breathing is a complex bodily function. Problematising the space of designing for breathing as a non-habitual act pertaining to diferent bodies or situations, we conducted a soma design exploration together with a classical singer. Refecting on how sensors could capture the impact and somatic experience of being sensed led us to develop a new sensing mechanism using shape-change technologies integrated in the Breathing Shell: a wearable that evokes a reciprocal experience of "feeling the sensor feeling you" when breathing. We contribute with two design implications: 1) Enabling refections of the somatic impact of being sensed in tandem with the type of data captured, 2) creating a tactile impact of the sensor data on the body. Both implications aim to deepen one's understanding of how the whole soma relates to or with biosensors and ultimately leading to designing for symbiotic experiences between biosensors and bodies. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Interaction design process and methods.

Fabulating Biodata Futures for Living and Knowing Together

“…Shell [71] pushes the boundaries of biodata by materializing breathing patterns haptically, felt by the wearer as shape-change actuation. This evokes an experience of being inside another body that breathes with your own.…”

La armadura de una investigadora: un compromiso material crítico con las experiencias somáticas

“…To engage with experiences of 'doing research' and 'being a researcher', I created a wearable artifact: 'The Armor of a Researcher' (short: 'The Armor'). The Armor resulted from an autobiographical soma design process (Höök et al, 2019;Tsaknaki et al, 2021) and through a Research through Design (RtD) approach, which "is a thing-making practice whose objects can offer a critique of the present and reveal alternative futures" (J. Bardzell et al, 2015, p. 2,095).…”

“…I used materials to express bodily insights through material properties and sensations on the skin. Others have used physical means to express bodily phenomena, e.g., Ozaki's 'Menstruation Machine' (2010) enables the experience of menstruating to be wearable; 'Breathing Shell' makes breathing tangible (Tsaknaki et al, 2021, p. 2); 'Menarche Bits', a prototyping kit that resulted from a soma-based process, allows users to prototype body-worn technologies that make space for their experiences of menstruation (Juul Søndergaard et al, 2020); 'wear.x', a wearable, embodies experiences of migraine (Beuthel & Wilde, 2017); and 'BREATH and WARMTH', also wearables that provide representations of loneliness in remote relationships (Beuthel et al, 2021). Aligning with these examples, The Armor is a material reflection of difficult first-person experiences, similar to the one provided by Devendorf et al (2020), who propose 'Design Memoirs', designerly prototypes that narrate complex and difficult personal experiences.…”

“…In this paper, I reflect on my somatic experiences of doing qualitative research. To do that, I turn towards soma design (Höök, 2018;Höök et al, 2019;Lee et al, 2014;Tennent et al, 2020;Tsaknaki et al, 2021Tsaknaki et al, , 2019. "At the core of soma design lies a first-person perspective on the body, in which designers engage with their somas thoroughly and slowly" (Höök et al, 2019, p. 4).…”

Singing Knit: Soft Knit Biosensing for Augmenting Vocal Performances

“…Creating custom collars allows for individual differences, however subtle, to be taken into account and for the best possible fit to be achieved. Also, a prominent theme in vocal wearables, is the exploration of the connection of the singer to their body and their body perception [5,6,67,82]. Therefore, achieving a "one-size-fits-all" collar might not be desireable, in fact it might negatively impact this theme, in masking the breadth of human body-diversity [71].…”