Tangible Body Maps of Felt-Sensing Experience

Abstract

There is a growing interest amongst the HCI community to access and articulate the core of experiences for design use. The premise is that, by accessing detailed accounts of everyday experiences, we can obtain refined material for the design of interactive systems more connected with our bodies and emotions. This TEI studio aims to introduce participants to the basis of phenomenologically grounded techniques in combination with the use of tangible materials as a way to articulate experience from the inner self, applied to the evaluation of existing technologies. This studio offers an alternative to assessment tools that rely on a predefined repertoire of feelings, to instead focus on emergent, complex and unclear aspects of our emotions. These strange collections of emotions-or felt senses-will be further explored through self-reporting tools and group exercises.