Human bodies are deeply political as they carry historical and social meanings, including race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and abilities. The expanding body-centric research in HCI can be traced in the plurality of methods, theories and domains that take bodies as a central point of departure, when designing or studying interaction with technologies. This one-day workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners within the CHI community to discuss, map, and unpack emerging tensions and challenges on the topic of body politics for HCI. Interested participants are invited to submit examples from their own research, which, in the workshop, will be used as a point of departure to critically reflect on and expand body-centric methods, theories and domains through the lens of body politics. Workshop outcomes will include charting future directions for body-centric research to address challenges and opportunities of acknowledging that bodies are always political in design research.

This workshop explores the interweaving of human and non-human relationalities through noticing strategies that decenter the anthropocentric perspective. As a starting point, we propose to examine our position of humans as interconnected and entangled with more-than-humans, problematising how this perspective could reshape human-centred methods and practices. We intend to elaborate on how our being in the world –co-shaped by non-human entities– can be experienced through embodying other (human or non-human) perspectives. We thereby explore noticing as a method and start tackling the following questions: How do designers relate in the design process to other humans and non-humans? How does decentring the human perspective lead to noticing emerging relations? What is a designer’s responsibility when designing with/through/for relations?

This pictorial introduces entangled weathers, a noticing tactic that poetically examines the interplay between our internal states and external weather. By drawing from the feminist concept of weathering and the introspective practice of noticing the weather inside, this work highlights how bodies are situated in a dynamic overlap between nature, culture, space, and time. Anchored in stories grounded in the author's design practice, this pictorial illustrates how cultivating sensibilities towards the weather brings several actionable viewpoints to notice, including (1) measuring and mapping, (2) uncovering space and time reflections, (3) weathering narratives, (4) metaphorising and (5) surrendering control. This work invites design researchers to reflect on their own weathers and emerging themes, connecting with sensuous knowledge central to more-than-human design.

How can we cultivate deeper attunement to one another, ourselves, and the environment that can, in turn, inform and enrich design? Over the course of four workshops conducted across 1.5 years – primarily outdoors – the authors engaged in prolonged periods of shared silence. This collective silence functioned as an estrangement method, revealing the porous and interdependent boundaries between people and things, mutually constituting one another. We unpack some of the experiential qualities emerging from these experiments and mobilize them for future design processes, including: cultivating multifaceted sensibilities, dynamic modes of noticing and interacting, such as coming together and dispersing, being alone together, and acting or playing in unison; the malleability of silence to specific, orchestrated design activities, such as cooking or designing; and reframing silence, not as an absence, but as a presence – rich with sounds, interactions, and possibilities for engagement. We discuss how to set up temporal and spatial boundaries, alongside boundaries within and between ourselves.

Designing technologies that clothe, adorn, or are otherwise placed on the body raises questions concerning the role they will play in dressing ourselves. We situate self-fashioning – or the process through which we stylise and present our bodies – as a complex practice where a series of social, material, and contextual factors shape how we present ourselves. Informed by reflective discussions and projective design tools, we contribute three critical points of departure for self-fashioning technologies: (i) Purposeful examining discomfort as an ongoing phenomenon, (ii) Supporting mimesis and visibility as qualities to be negotiated, and (iii) Envisioning the multiplicity of the body. We call for the design community to help devise fashionable technologies that are sensitive, caring, and responsive to the complexities of fashioning our bodies.

The role of our bodies in our meaning-making has been mostly absent in discussions concerning interactions with LLMs. Acknowledging this gap, this paper explores the use of ChatGPT as a tool for somatic introspection towards finding the words that "feel right" to our bodies and emotions. We document our three-month, first-person collaborative process using haiku-making and ChatGPT framed around Gendlin’s concept of "felt sense" —a type of ineffable bodily awareness that precedes representational meaning. In uncovering the potential of LLMs to support somatic introspection and self-reflection, we contribute two design qualities, which invite designers to consider (1) Ongoing temporalities -that is, interactions in and beyond the screen and (2) Idiolectic resonance, which considers the complexity of our idiosyncratic language expression. In navigating uncertainty, designing for somatic introspection redirects trust towards our bodies, opening for less data-centric ways of designing for reflection.

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, we employed soma trajectories to analyse collisions as extended experiences that negotiate key transitions of consent, preparation, launch, contact, ripple, sting, untangle, debris and reflect. We then employed these ideas to analyse two collision experiences, an accidental collision between a person and a drone, and the deliberate design of a robot to play with cats, revealing how real-world collisions involve the complex and ongoing entanglement of soma trajectories. We discuss how viewing collisions as entangled trajectories, or ‘tangles’, can be used analytically, as a design approach, and as a lens to broach ethical complexity.

To rigorously approach the more-than-human world in design research, we need to become more receptive and better equipped to describe the complexities of relationality. In response, this paper advocates for the articulation of the felt sense -or tacit knowledge residing in our bodies- as a viewpoint for noticing. Assisted by micro-phenomenological interviews, we carefully described our felt senses from our experiences with a telepresence robot and smartphone photography. We illustrate how this viewpoint allowed us to access our pre-judgemental dimension, the vivid liveliness in our experiences with technologies, and the porosity of our sense of self. We contribute the felt sense as a viewpoint for noticing to design researchers interested in integrating their somatic sensibilities into their work with the more-than-human, allowing them to attune to, describe and share with other researchers the normally unattended dimension of our experiences, including aspects concerning the felt dimension of ethics.

Chronic pain can be debilitating, taking over our senses and potentially destroying our means of describing our experiences. In this pictorial, we contribute three concepts based on the analysis of autosomatographies, a first-person narrative approach from illness and disability studies to communicate experiences of pain. These concepts suggest designers consider pain as (a) self-agentic, (b) a tool for empowerment, and (c) a means of creative expression. We illustrate the generation of these concepts through the first author's autosomatographical journals, highlighting how visual research greatly contributes to articulating expressive felt qualities of pain for design use. To exemplify the translation of these concepts into tangible prototypes, we retrospectively analysed two soma design case studies created to appreciate our bodies and learn from pain. We discuss the importance of acknowledging the persistence of chronic pain and the ethics of engaging in this type of design work.

Although there is a growing interest in the more-than-human, human-centred approaches are still dominant in HCI and design research. Emerging more-than-human approaches aim at decentring the human perspective in the design process while connecting human and non-human actors. This workshop explores strategies to bridge more-than-human with human-centred design and emphasises that decentring is not equal to disconnecting the human designer from being a human. Instead, we intend to elaborate on how our being in the world –co-shaped by non-human entities– can be experienced through decentring our individual human perspectives and re-connecting us to other perspectives, be they human or non-human. We start tackling the following questions: How do designers position themselves in more-than-human approaches? How does decentring the human perspective lead to growing empathy and care? What is a designer’s responsibility within more-than-human approaches?