Felt Ethics: Cultivating Ethical Sensibility in Design Practice

Soma design is a design stance that focuses on lived, corporeal experience as a method of designing interactive experiences [57]. This approach emerged as a response to our changing technological landscape, where ubiquitous and pervasive technologies increasingly engage our bodies in more corporeal – and intimate – forms of interaction [57]. Soma design draws on the philosophy of somaesthetics [90, 91], to serve as a practical means of generating insights and cultivating experiential skills that aid in the design of interactions that provide more rewarding, pleasurable, or fulfilling interactions [57]. Somaesthetics emphasises a three-fold approach to bodily cultivation through analytical, pragmatic, and practical engagement [91]; a continuous cycle of analysing/reflecting on practice, seeking methods to improve practice, and cultivating improved practices that resonate with the iterative, reflective, and epistemologically diverse nature of design practice [35, 70, 85].

Soma design explicitly places the subjective, pulsating, and moving body at the centre of the design process [57], and involves designers actively attuning themselves to their bodies and senses [62]; a process of cultivation that crystallises in the design outcome [96]. Soma design is a fundamentally non-dualistic design stance [58], placing emphasis on the movements of the body as the primary means by which the body creates and conveys meaning [72]. Movement, in this case, refer simultaneously to the kinetic, moving body [89], the felt-sensing body and inner shifts within ourselves, as well as the sensations mobilised by attuning to experiences [42]. In recent years, soma design has reached a point of maturity where the rigour and generativity of soma design to interaction design research is established [96]. Sensitizing oneself to one’s movements exposes tacit knowledge [79]. Making this tacit knowledge palpable or visible allows designers to engage – whether through materials, methods, or reflection – with knowledge and experiences that might otherwise remain unnoticed. This has been shown to provide richer, generative insights into the aesthetic potential of interactive design materials [62]; the transformative qualities of design [94]; ethics and values at play in the design space [32, 33, 80]; and the politics and non-neutrality of bodies [60].

As such, soma designers do not view ‘knowing’ (the rational) as being separate from ‘feeling’ (the emotional). As this is a distinction often made in Western ethical frameworks, the non-dualistic core of the soma design [58] can be seen as pushing back against the dichotomy between reason and emotion in ethical thinking. Ethics are, as such, not solely a matter of intellectual conviction. Damasio discusses the case of rehabilitation with patients who suffered brain injuries [26]. Although they knew ‘logically’ the difference between right and wrong action, the damage impaired their capacity for emotional regulation and, consequently, their ability to put their ethical knowledge into practice. Shusterman offers a different illustration of the centrality of our sensory engagement in ethics, arguing that complex social problems such as racism cannot be challenged by reasoning alone, as animosity against the other is grounded in bodily discomfort [91]. These examples show how understanding ethics as a sole compilation of ‘reasoned’ decision-making ignores the fundamental role of emotion – part of our corporeal reality — in the practice and sense-making of ethics. This echoes Varela, who criticised Western thought on ethics as focusing on moral intentionality as separated from action [106]. His enactive view places ethical action as being closer to a somatic than a strategic responsiveness. Proponents of a feminist ethics of care have also pointed to how a traditionally dualistic view of rationality and emotion – where emotional labour is seen to be of less ethical import than rational concerns over autonomy, sovereignty, and legislation – have fostered a society where many ethical concerns are minimised and rendered invisible [104]. A non-dualistic view of reason and emotion then shifts the conceptualisation from an ethics grounded in utility towards a morality grounded in care [11], which implies that moral concerns are closely related to the situated and contextual needs of others [102]. This requires designers to cultivate their somatic sensibility and, by extension, an increased receptivity towards our environment and the needs of others [88]. Soma designers have described this ethical dimension of their practice as fundamental to the outcomes of soma design [33, 80], identifying how ethics are enacted at the heart of soma design [32], and how designers need to openly welcome, but also care for each other during, ethically-challenging situations [80].

As an extension of rejecting the rationality/emotion dichotomy, soma design also rejects a similar dichotomy between ethics and aesthetics. Having permeated the Western intellectual tradition during the Enlightenment [21], this dichotomy differentiates between ethics (or the rational mind) as concerned with reasoned objectivity informing our moral judgement, and aesthetics (or the emotional body) as concerned with subjective opinions and base desires of beauty or pleasurable experience. Soma design bears a strong set of aesthetics ideals that may serve to guide design work, such as slowness, compassion, and appreciation [57]. Given the argument that rationality and emotion are a false dichotomy when it comes to ethical action [26], we need to consider in-depth the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in soma design.

Wittgenstein regards aesthetics as a subject misunderstood [112, p.1], mainly that issues relating to aesthetics are not limited to those of the artistic, but instead counterpart to many other philosophical enquires – including ethics. Wittgenstein goes so far as to say that ethics and aesthetic are one [113, 6.421] – or that ethical life is the reward of aesthetic value [101, p.65]. In essence, both aesthetics and ethics can be viewed as interrelated approaches to the philosophical question of how to live; ethics as reflecting a view of world and value of life, and aesthetics the means by which we can best live according to these values [101, p.65]. Wittgenstein indicates that the dualism between rationality and emotion is often hidden under an aesthetic guise [49]. Critical reasoning (the mind) is not separate from aesthetics (the matter). Wittgenstein not only viewed aesthetics and ethics as two interrelated aspects of the same philosophical enquiry, but also considered that the value of both could not be explained by purely symbolic or linguistic propositions. In other words, neither aesthetics, ethics, nor values can be separated from their material reality.

Similarly, Dewey argues that critical inquiry based in abstract, generalised knowledge divorced from feelings or aspirations is insufficient to make sense of many aspects of the world [6]. He sees the critical and aesthetic as interrelated aspects of the same approach to the question of how to live – aesthetics to enhance our capacity for meaningful experience, and criticism to inform how we consider meaningful experience and how to approach it through the aesthetics of living [28]. Here, Dewey describes a process that characterises the development of an aesthetic appreciation toward how we can have rich, meaningful experiences. It is important to note here, that Dewey describes a continuous process – one with no identifiable end – as to end this process risks the stagnation of our values. Dewey warns that we risk stifling progress if we do not seek to constantly develop our aesthetic repertoire [29]. Returning to Wittgenstein’s characterisation of the aesthetic as how ethical value is expressed, we then also risk stifling our ethical progress. In this way, we risk becoming unprepared to properly engage with either aesthetic or ethical values when we encounter them in design practice.

The somaesthetic project – and by extension soma design practice – can be regarded as synthesizing these positions, grounding aesthetics, ethics, and values in an even more radical conception of the non-dualistic body – a corporeal reality that is the foundation of symbolic aesthetic or ethical prepositions [88]. It is to this corporeal reality that we must also attend if we are to be prepared to make aesthetic or ethical judgements about what experiences we should design. Shusterman, building on Dewey’s aesthetics, describes this as a meliorative process of cultivating aesthetic and ethical sensibility as rooted in the body, and therefore, the process of cultivating these sensibilities becomes a matter of deep somatic engagement [90]. The implications of this for the soma design approach are clear; the aesthetic ideals that characterise the soma design approach (e.g., The Soma Design Manifesto [57]) do not only concern the aesthetic, for the aesthetic is a demonstration of an ethical position, a position that expresses a certain view of the world and what we believe should hold value in that world. This framing of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics can also be used to reveal that soma design, an ideal-driven practice, holds an implicit set of ethical positions at the heart of its aesthetic values. These positions are a manifestation of our ethical sensibilities, sensibilities that we engage with and change through the practice of a felt ethics. For our sensibilities do not and should not remain static; they necessitate an ongoing critical, somatic engagement or else our capacity to exercise our aesthetic or ethical sensibility may stagnate. Attending to our somatic experiences may reveal harmful societal nor political norms, enacted on or though our bodies, that can be subverted and changed. However, the subtle shifts of our somatic experiences can also foster an nuanced appreciation of our ethical selves, and how our ethical selves are revealed through our changing bodies, the different contexts in which we are situated, and the different people with whom we are surrounded. Somaesthetic practices allow us to notice our ways of living that may have become habituated, ingrained, and tacit, and offers a meliorative approach to improve these ways of living.

The first lens illustrates how Thorie engaged with her felt self at the core of her design practice and how this, in turn, allowed her to cultivate her ethical sensibilities. In soma design practice, aesthetic sensibilities are developed through the process we have just described; practical engagement blended with analysis, reflection, and critique that each serve to develop the others. As ethics and aesthetics can be regarded as reciprocal, we can treat the cultivation of ethical sensibility in a like manner. Soma design advocates for, and its methods foreground, a deep engagement with oneself; a heightened attentiveness to bodily signs and signals [95], movements and muscles [61], changes to our bodies [99], shifts of interest [68], new experiences [67], and engaging with the non-habitual or even uncomfortable [14, 110]. Attending to these felt experiences helps us understand our somatic responsivity – how we are engaged, enthralled, or even repulsed by certain experiences – rendering an aesthetic appreciation that we then draw upon in design work. Much like the slow development of an aesthetic appreciation [62], cultivating an ethical sensibility is a processual form of ethics [42], less concerned with abstract moral imperatives, but instead focused on a processual manner of cultivating our capacity to act ethically as manifested in the situated decisions we make throughout the design process. This is reflected in somaesthetic philosophy which says; "Attention to bodily feelings cannot explain our thinking, our emotions, or our will. But it can improve them. Somaesthetic sensations neither explain nor justify our aesthetic judgments, but they can help us enhance our aesthetic capacities and even our ethical powers" [90, p.134]. This is because soma design methods allow designers to traverse the dichotomies between inside and outside, individual and social, and body and technology [58].

Traversing these dichotomies, attending to our bodily signs and signals, moments of pleasure and discomfort, allows us to feel ethics – our somatic responses and ways of being that reveal our ethical sensitivities and sensibilities; whether we act or behave in accordance with certain expectations, whether our values or biases are reinforced or contested, whether our norms and habits are confirmed or challenged, or whether our encounters align with what we expect, or instead we are faced with something new. This can help us gain a greater understanding of our ethical sensibilities and even reveal those ingrained so deeply that we are not yet aware of them. Feeling ethics entails attending to many different kinds of experiences to gain both aesthetic and ethical understanding of the technologies we could design. Experiences that provoke discomfort, anger, or irritation can provoke our ethical sensibilities, but equally, joyful, comforting, and fulfilling experiences can help guide generative design work. Both of these can serve to help designers envision future possibilities for interaction [70]. Through somatic engagement, we can enhance and even remake our ethical sensibilities through reflection, analysis, and critique of our first person lived experiences. Somaesthetic cultivation is, not only a means of improving our physical capabilities and our aesthetic capacity for fulfilling experiences, but also of enhancing our capacity to act ethically towards others. This is, in part, because we can cultivate a greater capacity for empathy and compassion but also because "bodily rigidities and blockages are often both the product and a reinforcing support of social intolerance and political oppression" [92, p.153].

Thorie’s process of cultivation is characterised by an ongoing process of becoming – somatic sensitization, becoming aware, becoming discomforted, and then re-sensitizing her somatic sensibility. Somaesthetic cultivation can be a difficult, even painful, process [90]. Each part of this process challenged Thorie in different ways; sensitizing herself led to stress and anxiety over her energy usage and emotional difficulty resulting from the perceived failure to live up to her own ideals; becoming aware provoked moments of unfamiliarity triggered by her newfound sensitivity towards energy usage (such as the residual heat of her morning coffee) and noticing the fine-grained ways in which Eliza used water; becoming discomforted when Eliza’s different sensitivity to water consumption challenged her own; and then re-sensitizing herself, with Eliza’s aid, to a more sustainable way of engaging with water. Each of these moments in her process remade her relationship to energy and water, but each also remade her relationship to herself, shifting from being critical of her perceived failure to consume sustainably toward a gentler relationship of care and curiosity. Though the process challenged her, Thorie also found joy and connection in the experience of washing dishes with Eliza. These experiences became the aesthetic foundation of her design, marking what was precious to her in the experience, and leading her to emulate the moments of care and invitation in the interaction with the faucet. This engagement with and cultivation of the designer’s felt self is the core of soma design practice. We now apply the other lenses in turn, to reveal how the self is fundamentally relational and co-constituted, and by extension, how specific soma design practices allow us to practically engage with these dimensions of our ethical sensibilities.

The second lens highlights our intercorporeal self; our capacity for ethical sensitivity, the role of others in shaping our ethical sensibilities, and a relational conception of morality. Intercorporeality refers to our capacity to relate ethically towards each other, and how this capacity arises from the intercorporeal relationships between bodies. This is seen in Thorie’s sensitivity towards Eliza’s movements while washing the dishes and her capacity to understand their meaning and value. Thorie’s design work also demonstrates a relational morality; a morality that foregrounds a contextual ethical sensibility towards our interdependence with others that can serve to guide, but not determine, moral action. This morality is apparent in the water faucet itself – it guides one to take care when water is scarce but it does not forcibly determine that one should do so. Finally, we discuss the purposeful vulnerability that enables this intercorporeal, relational ethics to manifest in situated ethical decision-making – such as in the interaction between Thorie and Eliza in the A-Lab - which can be attended to within the design process for the purpose of further developing our ethical sensibility and to make the ethics of our practice visible.

Intercorporeality. Intercorporeality holds that communication and meaning-making are situated in the exchange between our lived, corporeal bodies and the surrounding world [73]. Merleau-Ponty describes this as a chiasm, a bi-directional exchange between the sensing body and sensed things that give rise to the possibility for communication [71]. This bi-directional exchange happens within the pre-reflexive and pre-conditional space of our bodies, and importantly, it creates the shared corporeal reality and points of reference necessary to communicate and share understanding. This is apparent when Thorie notices the subtle ways in which Eliza uses her body to conserve water. Thorie intercorporeally understands the meaning and value of Eliza’s movements based on their shared corporeal reality of conserving water. The intercorporeal relations between bodies constitute our ability to communicate meaning or value. Therefore, our capacity to relate ethically towards one another is also situated within the shared intercorporeal space of our bodies. It is only later that we are able to express or develop our ethical understanding through symbolic rules, moral frameworks, or linguistic prepositions – such as when Thorie speaks and reflects with Eliza on her hand movements. This positioning of meaning-making as corporeal is also reflected in the foundations of soma design. Like Merleau-Ponty, soma design engages with the body as the foundation of how ethical understanding and empathy arises through our shared intercorporeal apprehension of movement: "Movement is indeed our match point. That this lingual tactile-kinesthetic sense-making is closely related to empathy strongly suggests that where meaning is corporeally enacted, then intercorporeal sense-making only makes sense" [89, p.336]. It is to this capacity for ethical sense-making that soma design attends through the process of somatic cultivation. Thorie was better able to appreciate Eliza’s subtle movements after she herself had cultivated her own sensibility towards energy consumption. Somaesthetic cultivation can therefore be regarded as a returned attention to the capacity for ethical sensibility, rather than solely focusing on the symbolic moral expressions that arise because of this capacity.

Relational Morality. If we consider our capacity for ethical action as rooted in our relationships with others, then we must also consider relationality in the wider context of morality. In this sense, we can view an ethics based in our intercorporeality in a similar fashion to an ethics of care; a morality that acknowledges the fundamental corporeally-rooted interdependencies between ourselves and others, and an ethical sensibility – developed through practice – that can guide moral action [52]. An ethics of care questions the moral ideal of the fully autonomous and independent agent perpetuated by many normative Western frameworks, pointing out that this conception ignores the corporeal realities of infancy, illness, and old age – realities during which we are fundamentally dependent on others – and also serves to render many of the material realities of our interdependent society (such as labour) invisible [52]. Instead of focusing on morality as an individual’s actions judged against the criteria of a moral framework, a care ethic approach argues for a form of collective moral progress by attending to these issues from the perspective of a relational ontology of humanity – an ontology in which humans are not viewed as isolated actors but as beings whose well-being is interdependent with that of others [45]. This attitude is eventually adopted by Thorie, who shifts throughout this process from critically judging her actions against the absolute criterion of using as little energy as possible, towards an attitude of ongoing care regarding her energy consumption and an appreciation of water as a shared resource. A care ethic requires a situational understanding of ethical action rather than the application of absolute moral rules that may ignore the contextual reality of a politically and socially imperfect world [104]. To this end, and in a similar fashion to the somaesthetic approach, a care ethics advocates for a form of ethical sensibility to help inform ethical action, whilst not providing arbitrary conceptions of right or wrong action. This "analysis of what is necessary to be well and live well in the world can be expressed in terms of sensitizing principles to guide, but not determine, practice" [11, p.18]. It is practice that characterises a care ethic approach; and care requires an ongoing and critical engagement with the ethics at play in a certain situation. "Care is not a soft option – the work of making moral judgements about the best thing to do in often difficult circumstances, which could result in harm being caused as well as prevented, requires considerable rigour, strength and understanding" [11, p.18]. This conception of ongoing judgement is manifest in the design of the water faucet – where the shifting looseness of the faucet prompts an ongoing decision-making process regarding how much water to use, for it is a reminder that water is a shared resource fundamental to our collective well-being.

Engaging with the Intercorporeal Self: Fostering Shared Vulnerability: The practice of cultivating an appreciation of the incorporeal self is best illustrated in the A-Lab, where Thorie and Eliza co-facilitate a shared experience of washing dishes. Guiding someone through the experience of another person in not simply a matter of one participant acting while the other remains passive, for active and passive are too binary distinctions to capture the mutual engagement necessary in either role. Thorie actively chooses to remain passive – purposefully vulnerable – allowing herself to be led, whilst Eliza – purposefully vulnerable – consents to lead Thorie while potentially exposing her practices to scrutiny and critique. Eliza expressed doubt and insecurity over the interaction, concerned her dish-washing practices might not be ‘interesting enough’ or ‘worth revisiting’ for Thorie’s research. Eliza reflected on her nervousness to make the experience a success and how she had made subtle adjustments to her posture to help best facilitate Thorie’s engagement with the faucet. This is an example of "the fine texture of day-to-day decision-making; the subtle adjustments we make in the continuous flux of communication, in response to our intuitions about the needs of others; the search for personal meaning and clarity about personal goals and relations with others" [66, p.xviii]. This responsivity can be viewed as Eliza’s ethical-sensibility-in-action, or, to use Varela’s term, the practice of her ethical ‘know-how’ [106]. This is also evident when Thorie opened the faucet with too much strength, and Eliza exerted control over the situation to prevent the water spraying beyond the sink. This moment, although brief, demonstrates Eliza’s ethical sensibilities-in-action in a seemingly banal exchange; her sensitivity towards water consumption, her care for Thorie, and her perceived responsibility to ensure that the A-Lab was a successful experience. Popova et al. refer to these fine-grained adjustments as the interaction work that helps enable purposeful vulnerability [80]. Purposeful vulnerability is necessary in soma design work as the process of cultivating aesthetic appreciation might involve discomfort, even risk [33]. However, it is critical for developing our repertoire of experiences which can inform our aesthetic – and ethical – sensibilities. Popova et al. demonstrate that many of the fine-grained decisions that foster this vulnerability are enacted pre-reflexively – an example of our ethical sensibilities-in-action [80]. However, there are formalized soma design methods that also aid in fostering this environment. These include practices such as somatic connoisseurship [84]. These expert practitioners, who share their knowledge of specific somatic practices, also care for participants by guiding the process of engaging in a new practice, ensuring that participants do not suffer injury, and who can help them overcome the difficulties of engaging in an unfamiliar practice. Further, methods such as body maps [23] and trajectories [100] serve to encourage openness by enabling reflection and discussion. These are practical methods that help us articulate, and once articulated, we can share our inner thoughts and feelings, allowing those articulations to be compared, critiqued, and together debate consequences of the design work we are engaging in. As such, fostering vulnerability requires methods that ensure trust, empathy and productive ways of handling ethical intention and reflection.

The third lens emphasizes the socio-cultural and political self. We discuss this in terms of socio-cultural habits and political norms, and then, illustrate how we may engage with these through the disruption and defeminization of our ingrained sensibilities. During her design process, Thorie reflected on how she came to realise her ethical sensibilities were also socio-culturally shaped. Thorie spent half of her life in California, a place which has experienced chronic drought over the past decade. She reflected that she had not realised the extent to which this affected her relationship to water until she engaged herself and others in the design process, sensitising herself to her sensibilities and discussing her experiences with others. She reflected how this shaped her initial approach to controlling her energy use – disciplining herself through short showers, flushing the toilet less frequently, and reusing her dish-washing water for other purposes. The experience of living with a form of scarcity, and having experienced how it feels to be forced to adapt and change to it, also shaped her ethical sensibilities towards others. These experiences strengthened her resolve not to impose a constraints-based sustainable intervention on others; a result of her empathy towards the potential distress caused by being restricted, even if such restriction may have been warranted. Thorie’s experience shows how aspects of our ethical sensibilities are socio-culturally and politically constituted, and how we may disrupt our habits, norms, and values to reveal this shaping.

Socio-Cultural Habits. Feminist scholars have long criticized the dichotomy between of our ‘natural’ body and our ‘social or cultural’ mind [47]; a symptom of the same dualistic approach which soma design seeks to reject. "Even if mind cannot exist without body, the mind is regarded as a social, cultural, and historical object, a product of ideology, while the body remains naturalistic, pre-cultural; bodies provide the base, the raw material for the inculcation of and interpellation into ideology but are merely media of communication rather than the object or focus of ideological production/reproduction" [47, p.17]. Our bodies are disciplined in different ways, and shaped by different social realities. This can be seen in our ingrained habits, such as different ways of walking or eating, different tones of the voice and manners of speaking. While these may appear ‘natural’, they are trained within society and culture. The manner in which we are trained to walk is socially acquired [64], as are our ingrained expectations of how we should look and dress [31]. The ways in which we are trained to behave – such as our tastes and manners – all reflect our position in the social space [19]. One aspect of this socio-cultural shaping can be seen in Thorie’s relationship to water. She initially approached conserving water in the way she was socio-culturally accustomed, restricting and disciplining her consumption. However, the process of consistent engagement with her habitual ways of conserving water led Thorie to appreciate the stress and anxiety caused by disciplining herself towards a potentially unattainable ideal. Thorie then challenged and remade her socio-cultural sensibility into a healthier relationship between herself and her water consumption. This relationship was not forged in discipline and restriction, but rather an empathy to the corporeal reality of needing water and a commitment to progress towards as-best-as-possible [51] sustainable practices.

Political Norms. This also serves to reveal how our bodies are politically disciplined: at the centre of systems of monitoring, punishing, and normalising. Such systems serve to validate certain ways of behaving over others [39]. The forms of bodily disciplining – some blatant, others insidious – are omnipresent in schools, state institutions, and other organisations. They serve to establish the norms of our societies. Such norms in turn help society establish whether we should feel comforted or discomforted by certain practices or ways of life, such as lifestyles outside heteronormativity [38]. This becomes ubiquitous when we are surrounded by technologies that can further marginalise communities, reinforce structural inequalities, or result in further oppression [24] as well as contribute to issues of hidden labour and environmental degradation [25]. These harms are enacted through technologies onto the lived experiences of people who engage with them. "Power relations and systems of representations not only traverse the body and utilise its energies [...] but - actively constitute the body’s very sensations, pleasures ― the phenomenology of bodily experience" [48, p.111]. The disciplining of bodies is part of the history of capitalism; the re-constitution of body into a means of production – a body that should be machine-like and detached [36]. It is also a part of the history of gender with particular emphasis on how women are taught to control their emotions [55]. This results in the cost of challenging the normalised ways of being and feeling: "in other words, to begin a feminist life is to hear an accusation; it is to hear that others understand you as failing to carry out your duties in the right way" [2, p.63]. Thorie’s design process and artefact can be interpreted politically. Rather than viewing the ethical question of sustainability from a utilitarian perspective (that such discipline is justified for the greater environmental good), the water faucet is instead a subversive speculation that challenges political methods of disciplining bodies and diminishing moral agency on the part of individuals. Thorie sees the path to conserving resources as being a matter of empathy and somatic freedom, designing an artefact that enables others to act with care, responsibility, and accountability.

Engaging with the Socio-Cultural and Political Self: Disrupting Ingrained Habits and Norms: The process of ethical cultivation often involves discomfort evoked through disrupting our habitual or normative ways of being. Soma design practice frequently employs methods that (explicitly or implicitly) foreground estrangement [13, 110] by actively seeking to disrupt a habitual or normative way of moving [57]. Through estrangement we can ask; "What is done to disrupt the […] current state of affairs? What physical or conceptual elements are added to or taken away from the body or the action? What is destabilised by this disruption? What norms, traditions, structures, or systems become – conceptually or physically – unstable? What emerges from this destabilisation? What does it bring into awareness?" [110, p.4]. The moments of discomfort elicited through estrangement are vital to reveal the boundaries of our ethical sensibilities – moments where our sensitivities or pre-conceptions are disrupted and destabilized. This discomfort can challenge us towards ethical growth, prompting us to reflect on ourselves, our ingrained norms, habits, values, motivations, and judgements. As our bodies have been disciplined and shaped in different ways, challenging these disciplines is a ‘subversive project’ [17] that seeks to remake the boundaries, reconstitute the habitual, rebuild the norms built into our bodies, and critically examine the disciplines that have shaped our bodies in these ways. The ethical project of soma design is an inherently political enterprise, approaching ethics in bodily and design explorations that seek to question whether our norms and values serve to help or harm ourselves or others.

Finally, the fourth lens underlines the entangled self; how our ethical sensibilities can be co-constituted by different, often non-human, agencies. It is through somatic encounters with materials and technologies that we can begin to foster an understanding of these entangled materials, ethics, and agencies. The design process of the water faucet reveals how humans and non-humans are ethically interconnected and mutually transformative; that our ethical sensibilities are inseparable from the designed artefacts and technologies with which we are entangled [40]. Thorie’s design process shows that the space of intercorporeality – the shared corporeal space in which our bodies are constituted by others – is not only occupied by human bodies, but also non-human materials and agencies that shape our bodies and actions [73]. It recognizes a more-than-human conception of our corporeal interdependence [56], showing how our ethical sensibilities extend beyond other individuals. The design of the water faucet demonstrates how our ethical sensibility can be both shaped and mediated by non-human agencies such as artefacts and technologies [65].

Transcorporeal Interdependence. The interdependence between us and the non-human world is best described by Alaimo, who recognises what she terms ‘transcorporeality’; an extended conception of human corporeality as entangled with, among others, biological systems such as water [4]. Water can be considered one of the primary corporeal interdependencies between us and the non-human world, not simply a resource for our consumption but vital to the survival of all life. New materialists such as Bennett advocate for cultivating the sensibility to recognize these forms of agency – that "the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it" [16, p.22] is of primary ethical import. Thorie, by cultivating her ethical sensibility toward her energy consumption, also became more appreciative of the different textures and materialities with which she was entangled. Not only was she more attentive to the physical textures of different energies underlying perceptual experience (wetness or heat), but also of the different kinds of attention given to energy interactions, the ebb and flow of appreciation towards energy use that play a role in fostering meaningful engagement with energy. This relational understanding of our corporeal interdependence with water and sensitivity towards its non-human vitality served in shaping her design process. It is argued that relational and expansive design based on humility and cohabitation [109], one based in the radical interdependence of all beings, is vital to help HCI researchers cultivate decolonial and sustainable practices [34]. A relational understanding of our entangled bodies can also help us in attending to ethics as they unfold or are enacted in situated design practice [32, 80]. Design practice can be viewed as a complex entanglement, involving multiple humans, design materials, artefacts, resources, technological processes, and other infrastructural factors that all shape the design process. Our ethical sensibility and the ethical decisions that are enacted within the design process are constantly shaped by this assemblage of agencies; Thorie’s ethical sensibilities in this process were shaped at the nexus of different energies, technologies, people, and socio-cultural circumstances.

Technological Mediation. This entanglement perspective also reveals how designed artefacts and technologies can be explicitly or implicitly ingrained with ethical qualities or may mediate or shape ethical action [108]. In postphenomenological terms [82], technologies co-constitute our intentionality [107], and by extension our ethical action, either by acting as a mediator of our ability to act or by re-shaping our relationship to the world in a way that influences how we may act. Thorie’s shifting water faucet can be seen as a mediator that co-constitutes an individual’s ethical intentionality. It reshapes a static interaction between an individual and a faucet, into a dynamic interaction that serves to reveal the faucet as a mediator between the individual and the water reservoir – thus the relationship becomes visible and an ethical choice is prompted. The shifting looseness of the faucet disrupts a sedimented movement – the way in which a technology invites someone to move or use their body to interact with it [32]. A faucet normally remains static which habituates the movements and sensations that arise when we interact with it and thus the faucet fades into the background of our experience. By constantly disrupting these sedimented movements with a shifting tension, the faucet exemplifies Thorie’s ethical sensibility; a constant and ongoing attentiveness towards water consumption.

Engaging with Entangled Self: Encountering Materials, Ethics, and Agencies: Soma design practice is characterized by slow and repeated material and technological encounters [57]. This process allowed Thorie to become familiar with the different textures and materialities of the energies flowing through her home, but also helped her understand the different qualities of attention that energies can elicit. She became attentive to its vital materiality [16] and the shifting agencies of energy that were revealed and concealed during different interactions. Thorie reflected that energy usage often fades into the background amidst the other demands of life, making it harder to foster a meaningful, critical engagement with energy. It was through attentiveness to the agency of energy that she was best able to start attuning to her practices. This is reflective of the complex materials we often work with in soma design. Many interactive materials change with use and some computational design materials are harder to ‘feel’. Soma design strives to make computational design materials visible and palpable in the design process [57]; exploring intelligent systems that are ‘graspable’ rather than purely explainable [43, 44], transfiguring abstract bodily data through tangible and perceptible modalities [5], and drawing attention to the felt or experiential aspects of data that manifest in our entangled lives [83]. This not only helps us understand their aesthetic potential but also their agential capacity to shape the ethics of an interaction. This is exemplified by the faucet – the palpable tension and looseness is an agentic mechanism designed to foster an ethical relationship with the water in the reservoir. Understanding the agency of our materials may allow us to better engage with the temporality of our designs, their potential consequences, their capacity to transform lives [94], as well as their eventual decomposition and disposal [109]. Our materials and technological encounters can be a step towards viewing humans and non-humans as a meaningful whole [109], drawing attention to the material-discursive agency [96] that constitutes the design process. Attending to our encounters, as enactments of situated knowledge [50] and practices [97], can allow us to better understand the agency of our design materials to shape our ethical sensibilities, decision-making, and action-taking.