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 [1]. Soma design builds on pragmatics and in particular on somaesthetics by Shusterman [2]. 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 pro-cess. 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.