Keynotes

Designing with the Body: Somaesthetic Interaction Design

We are at a watershed moment where our relationship to technology is about to undergo a dramatic and irreversible shift.  With the rise of ubiquitous technology, data-driven design and the Internet of Things, our interactions and our interfaces with technology will look radically different in the years ahead, incorporating changes like full body interaction, shape-changing interfaces, wearables and movement tracking apps. These changes offer an enormous opportunity – indeed, a necessity – to reinvent the way we interact with the inanimate world. Once-familiar, everyday objects, from our phones to our vacuums, require novel interaction models – not just typing text on screens, but, increasingly, movement-based, bodily communication. A qualitative shift is required in our design methods, from a predominantly symbolic, language-oriented design stance, to an experiential, felt, aesthetic stance permeating the whole design and use cycle.

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.

Kristina Höök is a full Professor in Interaction Design at Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm Sweden. Höök is a frequent keynote speaker, known for her work on social navigation, seamfulness, mobile services, affective interaction and lately, designing for bodily engagement in interaction through somaesthetics. Her competence lies mainly in interaction design and user studies helping to form design. Höök has obtained numerous national and international grants, awards, and fellowships including the Cor Baayen Fellowship by ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) for her thesis work in 1997, the INGVAR award from the Strategic Research Foundation (SSF) in 2004, she is an ACM Distinguished Scientist since 2014, and she is an ACM distinguished speaker.

Wearable sensorimotor interfaces

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.

Domenico is Professor of Robotics at the University of Siena, Senior Scientist at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genova, Fellow of the IEEE society, and Co-founder of the startup WEART, a startup for VR and AR applications. Human and robotic hands together with the art of manipulating real and virtual objects have always polarized his research that has recently focused on wearable haptics, VR/AR and wearable robotics. He founded the SIRSLab where he has been leading an extraordinary and enthusiastic research team for years. Since 2013, he co-ordinates the strategic project “ WEARHAP: wearable haptics for humans and robots ” founded by the European Community with applications on virtual and augmented realities and to collaborative robotics. In 2010 he co-ordinated the project on “REMOTOUCH: remote touch” tactile communication, selected for the presentation at Expo Shangai 2010 under the initiative of “Italia degli Innovatori” promoted by the Ministry of Innovation. Awarded in 2014 with the MathWorks Education Award. In 2017, in Phoenix, his project “the Robotics Sixth Finger” was selected among the best innovative projects at the Wearable Robotics Association Conference, wearRAcon.

He has held many plenary talks on robotics, including the most recent at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (2016) and the International Conference on Asia Haptics (2017) where he won the award fir his research activities in virtual reality. He has been selected among the best two Cross-Cutting Challenges Initiatives at the IEEE Haptic Symposium 2018 in San Francisco with the theme “The path to intelligent clothes and objects able to change the way we communicate with the world”. Author of more than 250 scientific articles in the field of robotics and virtual reality.