Focusing for Interaction Design: An Introspective Somatic Method

Attending to the challenges of describing first-person experience, this article illustrates different uses of the Focusing method in interaction design and HCI, offering a systematic way of accessing the subtle qualities of lived experiences for design use. In this approach, the implicit bodily knowledge -or felt sense- becomes the material capture of aesthetic experiences used to inform data collection, ideation and prototyping. We offer a high-level, yet systematic coverage of Focusing applied to two case studies, informing both a set of instructions to use the method and a series of design considerations to adopt this understudied tool of introspection in interaction design research and practice.