Höök et al., via Tangible Affect (DIS ‘24)
What it says
The way you attend to your body changes the way you experience your emotions. So a design can work by slowing a person down and turning their attention inward, rather than by presenting them with something to look at. The designer’s own body is a research instrument here — you build by feeling, not only by specifying.
Does it hold for my work
This is the closest existing tradition to the embodied sensory experience half of my direction, and it is the one I have read least of. That gap is worth naming: I have been describing my work in these terms for months while getting the concepts second-hand through a survey paper.
Where it strains
Somaesthetic design is quiet, slow, usually single-body and often eyes-closed. My work is a screen, a controller, and now several strangers in a room. Those are close to opposite conditions.
So I do not think I can adopt the method. What I can take is the premise underneath it — that sensation is the thing being designed, not the interface.
Next
Read Höök directly rather than through the survey.