Description
Sensory Data Dialogues is a body of research and practice that explores how sensory data can be engaged as an interpretive and embodied medium rather than a fixed or objective representation of experience. The work draws on somaesthetic design, body mapping, and material explorations to examine how sensory experiences emerge through relationships between bodies, technologies, and environments. Across projects, participants engage with digital sensors, tactile materials, and first-person methods such as journaling, sketching, and body mapping to generate and reflect on data in context. This includes extending body maps as generative tools for capturing tacit, hard-to-articulate somatic experiences, as well as developing alternative material approaches such as tactile body maps that use textured fabrics to represent sensations and emotions. Through this work, sensory data becomes a site for dialogue between individual experience, collective reflection, and more-than-human contexts, supporting more situated and nuanced approaches to designing with embodied experience.
Studies
In-Situ Seeding: Entangling Place & Technology through Sensory Data Dialogues
Interactive technology design is situated within environmental and sociocultural context. This pictorial develops an In-Situ Seeding method for engaging with site-specific sensory experiences. This method stems from a previous TEI Studio, where we utilized Sensory Portfolios, digital sensors, and other materials to make sense of interaction in place. We present an annotated collection of our Studio experiences and autobiographical retrospective reflections. These Seeds supported in-situ sensory explorations and examination of entanglements between documentation, data, location, history, and human and more-than-human agents. We contribute to literature around (1) walk-and-talk sensory explorations, (2) situated entanglements with technological artifacts, and (3) relationships between human and non-human agents in shared locations and over varied timescales. Our reflections point towards continued development for In-Situ Seeding as a method and suggest its further use and guidance to support future sensory explorers.
Queer/Crip Body Mapping: Expressing Dynamic Bodily Experiences with Data
Drawing on queer and disability theories alongside tangible body mapping techniques, we explore alternative ways of mapping embodied experiences and expressing affective sensations. Our collaborative autoethnographic approach incorporates sensors to trace our somatic experiences over time, pairing visualizations of contextual biodata with personal reflections in written or spoken form. We unpack how these alternative approaches to body mapping support reflecting on, communicating, and deepening understanding of embodied experiences by foregrounding temporal and situated aspects. We offer expanded body mapping methods by sharing a plurality of experiences that embrace queer and crip ways of knowing, foregrounding alternate temporal and spatial representations.
Sensory Data Dialogues: A Somaesthetic Exploration of Bordeaux through Five Senses
The design of interactive systems and digital artefacts often makes use of digital or analog sensory data as a way to “capture” human senses and sensory experiences. Yet, designing for and with sensory data is complex because of our unique, embodied ways of making sense of our somatosensory experiences. Sensory data does not have one prescribed meaning for everyone. We propose a one-day Studio at TEI to start a dialogue about work with sensory data and its representation of human sensory experience. Specifically, we propose a guided walk and series of sensory explorations in Bordeaux to contemplate the interplay between first-person somatosensory experiences and streams of site-specific data from various sensors. By walking and noticing together, this Studio invites participants to engage in a process of creative reflection on their felt experiences, their connection to their surroundings, and their stance within or outside the design community.
Tactile Narratives: Augmenting Body Maps through Textured Fabric in Soma Design
In Human-Computer Interaction, body maps are a standard tool to understand an individual's bodily phenomenon. Body maps often use abstract drawings and text annotations on an outline of a body. However, little research has explored alternate ways we can collect similar data. In this pictorial, we present tactile body maps, which use an array of textured fabric circles attached to a felt-shaped body instead of a more traditional approach to drawing body maps. We first present an illustration of how researchers can use tactile body maps and show an example of the type of data collected in the method. We then tested the augmented body map method alongside drawing body maps and verbal-only body descriptions with eight participants to explore the benefits and disadvantages of each technique. Through the data, we present a set of considerations that a researcher can use to decide which way would be most appropriate for their soma design process.
Body Maps: A Generative Tool for Soma-based Design
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 map, together with four case studies that provide examples of using body maps in design research. We identify five uses of body maps as generative tools for soma-based design, ranging from sampling bodily experience, heightening bodily self-awareness, understanding changing bodily experience over time, identifying patterns of bodily experience, and transferring somatic experiential qualities into physical designs. The different requirements for scaffolding the use of body maps in user-centred design versus first-person autobiographical design research are discussed. We provide this pictorial as a resource for designers and researchers who wish to integrate body maps into their practice.