Soma Design – Intertwining Aesthetics, Ethics and Movement

I will discuss soma design — a process that allows designers to examine and improve on connections between sensation, feeling, emotion, subjective understanding and values. Soma design builds on pragmatics and in particular on somaesthetics by Shusterman. It combines soma as in our first-person sensual experience of the world, with aesthetics as in deepening our knowledge of our sensory experiences to live a better life. In my talk, I will discuss how aesthetics and ethics are enacted in a soma design process. Our cultural practices and digitally-enabled objects enforce a form of sedimented, agreed-upon movements, enabling variation, but with certain prescribed ways to act, feel and think. This leaves designers with a great responsibility, as these become the movements that we invite our end-users to engage with, in turning shaping them, their movements, their bodies, their feelings and thoughts. I will argue that by engaging in a soma design process we can better probe which movements lead to deepened somatic awareness; social awareness of others in the environment and how they are affected by the human-technology assemblage; enactments of bodily freedoms rather than limitations; making norms explicit; engage with a pluralist feminist position on who we are designing for; and aesthetic experience and expression.