I will discuss soma design – a process that allows designers to ‘examine’ and improve on connections between sensation, feeling, emotion, subjective understanding and values. Some design engages with bodily rhythms, touch, proprioception, bodily playfulness, but also with our values, meaning-making processes, emotions, ethics and ways of engaging with the world. Soma design also provides methods for orchestration of the ‘whole’, emptying the digital and physical materials of all their potential, thereby providing fertile grounds for meaning-making and engagement.

Wearable haptics is an emerging research trend that will enable novel forms of communication and cooperation between humans and robots. The literature on wearable haptics has been mainly focused on vibrotactile stimulation and only recently wearable devices conveying richer stimuli, like forces, have been proposed. In this talk, I will introduce design guidelines for wearable haptics and will review the research in this field and I will show how extraordinary is the paradigm shift in both human-human and human-robot cooperation.