Somatic and somaesthetic design practices in NIME: Sharing experiences, methods, tools, and concepts

Somatic and somaesthetic perspectives have increasingly become a part of the NIME community in recent years. In particular, many practitioners within NIME (and beyond) have adopted techniques, concepts, and tools from soma design-a methodology that centers the focus of design on the soma, i.e., the body, the lived experience, and first-person perspectives on embodied phenomena. In this workshop, we aim to gather with artists, designers, researchers, musicians, and creative practitioners at NIME to provide them with a platform to: (1) learn about soma design in NIME and musicking through our two keynotes, and group of expert panelists, (2) share their experiences of employing somatic/somaesthetic techniques to guide their creative choices, and how they are producing knowledge in the form of methods, tools, and concepts in this space, and (3) network with other like-minded researchers and practitioners who share a common body-centric perspective on design, interaction, and performance. Additional Key Words and Phrases: soma design, DMI design, embodiment, performance practice, bodily experience, body-centric perspectives 1 Introduction and Motivation Soma design is an emergent design method that focuses on designing with somaesthetic appreciation [16], i.e., by harnessing the first-person perspective and lived experience of phenomena as a design resource. It originated from the somatic turn in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)/Interaction design (IxD) communities [12], initially proposed by Kristina Höök [8]. Since its inception, it has rapidly permeated a wide range of application domains, such as household items [17], health and well-being [4], interactions with robots and drones [11], and the arts, including the sonic arts [3], dance [15], and biofeedback-based artworks [10]. Within NIME research and musicking practices, it has been explored in, including but not limited to, the following domains: instrument design, singing, live performance, improvisation, and accessibility [1, 2, 5-7, 13]. On its own, soma design also constantly expands its design palette to include techniques from other design approaches and discourses, such as micro-phenomenology [14], and embodied design ideation (e.g., defamiliarisation) [18]. In this way, soma design is influenced by artistic practices (both somatic and non-somatic), just as it is influenced by turns in HCI and expanded upon by its practitioners. In this workshop, we aim to explore how practitioners of soma design as well as other somatic and somaesthetic practices-or overall, people from the NIME community interested in this space-are actively contributing to the expansion of these practices. These practitioners expand the existing soma design framework by adopting its methods, tools, and concepts, but also through adaption of these existing methods and by creating new ways of engaging with them in the context of NIME design and musicking practices. We hope that this workshop serves as a creative space to build, strengthen, and expand upon existing threads of work and collaboration in these areas. In the following sections, we provide further detail on the workshop's structure and schedule, as well as organizers and speakers. We also provide a boilerplate workshop description to be used in the NIME 2025's workshops program and details on our prospective call for participation, which we will distribute across the NIME mailing list and other music technology and design-related networks to invite the community at large.