Voicing Discomfort, Communicating Breakdowns: Design Exploration of Felt Ethics in a Body-Based Workshop

This paper reports on a body-based exploration of felt ethics through a workshop with interaction designers. Contributing to developments of hands-on methods to approach ethics, we engaged with ethics through the experience of discomfort from interpersonal interaction. Our workshop methodology is grounded in soma design approach, while the theoretical roots of our work are in the ethics of care. In this paper, we analyse the workshop results based on video-recordings and post-workshop interviews with participants. Using a qualitative inductive approach, we consider (1) what constitutes discomfort in the interaction between workshop participants, and (2) how participants make this discomfort shared. Through that, we identify the ways in which bodies feel and display discomfort, and how it extends our understanding of ethics. We reflect over the potential, limitations, and risks of body-based workshops to explore design ethics, i.e. the norms and values of design practice, as a felt phenomenon.