Kristina Höök

Title of the project
Soma Design

Background and summary of fellowship:
Soma design puts first-person aesthetic sensory experience and expertise in the front seat during the design process. It builds on the theories of somaesthetics – a combination of soma—our subjective self, body, emotion, and thinking—and aesthetics—our perceptual appreciation of the world. Through engaging with and deepening your capacity to discern sensuous experiences, you can examine and improve on connections between sensation, feeling, emotion, and subjective understanding and values. Soma design is a path to imagine – through your senses, movements and material encounters – what could be during a design process. A soma design process thrives off the aesthetic potential of the sociodigital materials and the creative process of shaping these into dynamic gestalts, orchestrated experiences.

Here, Höök is exploring two strands of work:

First, digital touch: exploring the aesthetic potential of bodyworn digital/physical materials to evoke and feel touch. It is an interdisciplinary project combining competencies: in body-worn soft and compliant sensor nodes; high-pressure microfluidics and miniaturized actuators; and their materials science; backscatter sensor-actuator network technology; and interaction design addressing touch through intimate correspondence relationships through soma design.

Second, ethics: the goal is to contribute new knowledge to the field of design in the form of an analytical, practical and pragmatic framework to grasp the ethicality of emerging, complex, felt, bodily practices that shape our corporealities and through which ethics are enacted – manifested and cultivated through our moving bodies.