Conference Agenda

Serenity plays a pivotal role in human well-being, as it fosters an enduring sense of peace and calmness. Everyday textile artifacts, with their qualities of softness, malleability, and flexibility, hold the capacity to greatly enhance serenity in user experiences. Drawing from the foundation of materials experience and material-driven design, this paper introduces a design toolkit aimed at harnessing the potential of textiles in creating serene experiences. The toolkit was refined through two exploratory workshops involving design professionals from both academic and industrial backgrounds. By emphasizing the interplay of form, material, and time in textile experiences, this toolkit offers a vocabulary and set of techniques for discussing and designing for serene textile experiences across different material and time scales. We further explore avenues for the toolkit's employment, expansion, and adaptation for use in a wide array of material-driven design projects

The significance of occupational exoskeletons is increasing, offering relief and improving well-being for physically demanding tasks. Existing adoption frame-works reveal crucial factors for development (like wearing comfort and task fit) and implementation (such as familiarization time and organizational perspective). How-ever, physical aspects are addressed primarily through ergonomics. As exoskeleton technology inherently involves the body, the user's perception and experience are tied to bodily experiences. Further research is needed to understand the human-exo-skeleton interaction comprehensively and explore how the user experience unfolds and how the exoskeleton's and user's characteristics influence each other. Our con-tribution, a conceptual framework leveraging established frameworks of user experi-ence and the concept of body experience, addresses this gap by contextualizing the body within the exoskeleton research. We examine the nuanced dynamics of the un-folding human-exoskeleton experience and how its various aspects entangle them-selves around the user's corporeality, affecting the users' relationship with their bod-ies and self-perception.

This paper sets out to view disability from a medical construct to a multi-faceted approach, considering biological, psychological and social factors. This helps us understand the need for a phenomenological approach to address disability from a ‘lived’ perspective, acknowledging the personal experiential dimension. A perspective this research adopts to underpin an argument that aesthetics from a cultural perspective plays a role in ‘Extraordinary’ wellbeing, as the study explores how the condition Raynaud’s shapes a ‘dys-appearing’ body through material experience. This paper presents research that investigates how women living with Raynaud’s negotiate their impairment through the mediums of clothing and fashion. Data were collected via in-depth, semi-structured interviews and wardrobe studies, informed by Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. The findings reveal the ‘material experience’ of ten women with ‘Extraordinary’ requirements and highlighted how aesthetics is fundamental to enhance wearer’s pleasurable and inclusive experiences on a personal and public level.

This paper presents the results of an experiment on the effects of biophilic sound on electroencephalography (EEG) activations by comparing two virtual classroom designs: one non-biophilic and one biophilic. The results reveal significant inter-hemispheric interactions in theta, alpha, and gamma frequency bands. The presence of biophilic sound in conjunction with other biophilic elements decreases beta power, compared to its absence. These findings underscore the influence of auditory biophilic experiences on neurophysiological responses, providing insights for evidence-based design strategies to enhance biophilic environments.

As people return to offices post pandemic, they trudge through familiar daily hassles of long commute. Music moves people. Wearable music devices like head-phones that people carry act as a mediator that allows them (listeners) to be ‘tuning-in’ to music to ‘tune out’. When engaged, people physicalize movement- tapping their feet, playing “air-piano” or imagining gestures. This paper explores the theme of Recovering in Design for Wellbeing and Happiness through the in-terplay between people, music and portable music devices including head-phones and haptics. Thematic analyses of observations and semi-structured inter-views reveal listeners’ lived experience (Presence) and wellbeing (Flow) in rela-tion to the devices used. Using timeline-based visualisations, we aggregated trends of listener’s Presence and Flow to interrogate findings. Findings suggests underlying variables inherent in the designs that enhance Presence and Flow for people ‘tuning-in’ to music to ‘tune-out’ from stresses during long commute.