Body Transformation Experiences: A panel Sustainable Body Transformation Experiences
Ana Tajadura-Jiménez, Kristi Kuusk, Kristina Höök, Pedro Lopes, Mel Slater, Elena Márquez Segura & Laia Turmo Vidal.
Introduction
Our bodies shape how we sense, move, and engage with the world. Research across psychology, cognitive neuroscience, somaesthetics, and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) shows that bodily experience is not fixed but dynamic—continually adapting, recalibrating, aging, forgetting, and sometimes surprising us anew. In this ongoing flux, interactive technologies can participate in how bodies are felt and lived, inviting shifts that may be momentary, recurring, or difficult to clearly delimit .
Multisensory research has demonstrated that visual, auditory, haptic, and other forms of feedback can alter how people perceive their body’s size, configuration, location, abilities, and internal sensations (e.g., Botvinick & Cohen, 1998; Lenggenhager et al., 2007; Tajadura-Jiménez et al., 2015). Such interventions can give rise to Body Transformation Experiences—moments or trajectories in which the body is perceived differently, opening new ways of sensing, moving, or relating to oneself. These experiences have been explored across domains including health and rehabilitation, chronic pain, physical activity, artistic practice, social interaction, and immersive virtual reality .
As these insights translate into technologies such as shape-changing wearables, computational textiles, sensory-augmentation devices, and immersive mixed-reality systems, new questions emerge. What makes a body transformation meaningful? Should it persist to matter? Or can a fleeting or singular experience be transformative enough? Rather than assuming linear or lasting effects, this panel approaches transformation as something that may be episodic, cumulative, reversible, or deliberately temporary .
The panel brings together Ana Tajadura-Jiménez, Kristina Höök, Kristi Kuusk, Pedro Lopes, and Mel Slater, whose work spans neuroscience, somaesthetic design, smart and biodegradable textiles, human–computer integration, and immersive virtual reality.
Their perspectives are deliberately heterogeneous. While sometimes portrayed as opposing—empirical versus phenomenological, scientific versus experiential—these approaches are treated here as complementary and mutually enriching. Together, they invite a more nuanced understanding of what “transformation” can be.
Across four interconnected themes—Experience, Materiality, Everyday Integration, and Ethics & Politics—the panel explores what sustainability might mean for body transformation technologies. Sustainability is considered not only in ecological terms, but also experientially, socially, and ethically: supporting bodily multiplicity, attending to everyday life, and avoiding narrow norms of what bodies should be or become. Rather than offering definitive answers, the panel opens a space for dialogue around complexity, plurality, and care in designing future body-based technologies.
Panel Themes
The panel is structured around four interconnected themes that frame our discussion of Sustainable Body Transformation Experiences. The short blurbs below offer an overview of each theme and the questions it raises. For a more detailed and nuanced discussion, including references and extended arguments, we invite readers to consult the full panel submission.
Experience — What Changes, and for How Long?
Body Transformation Experiences may shift how people perceive their bodies, act through them, or make sense of bodily sensations, agency, and movement. These changes can be immediate or subtle, fleeting or remembered, cumulative or deliberately temporary. Rather than assuming transformation must persist to matter, this theme explores experience as dynamic and situated: bodies recalibrate, forget, adapt, age, and surprise us. Sometimes the most meaningful transformation lies in the lived process of perceptual change—or in a single, novel moment that reveals the body’s malleability.
Materiality — How Bodies Meet Materials
Materials are not passive carriers of interaction but active participants in how bodies feel, move, and are perceived. From wearables and computational textiles to bio- and eco-materials, this theme examines how material choices scaffold bodily experience, blur boundaries between body and technology, and invite new forms of sensing and action. Attention is given not only to material responsiveness, but also to how materials age, are maintained, and integrate into everyday practices—raising questions about how material lifecycles shape the sustainability of transformation.
Everyday Integration — Transformation in Daily Life
Body transformation technologies are often explored in short-term or carefully staged settings, yet everyday life introduces messiness, interruptions, and competing priorities. This theme considers how body-based technologies intersect with daily routines, social situations, changing bodies, and shifting motivations—sometimes fitting in, sometimes being adapted, and sometimes being set aside. Rather than assuming that successful transformation requires long-term adoption, the panel asks how experiences unfold over time, including moments of appropriation, pause, breakdown, or abandonment. In this view, everyday integration is not a goal to be optimized, but a terrain where transformations may be sustained, revisited, resisted, or allowed to fade, each in ways that can still matter.
Ethics & Politics — Designing for Multiplicity
Designing body transformation technologies means engaging with bodies as sites of meaning, identity, and power. This theme addresses the ethical and political implications of shaping bodily experience: visibility and invisibility, datafication and objectification, and the risk of reinforcing normative ideals of ability, productivity, or appearance. Drawing on feminist, humanistic, soma-based, and disability justice perspectives, the panel explores how to design transformations that expand possibilities without prescribing them, supporting diverse bodies and redistributing control between designers and users.
Panel Structure
The panel fosters debate and active audience participation by combining position statements with dynamic, curated discussion. During the position statements, the audience can submit questions via an online platform, which moderators will select to guide the discussion and ensure diverse perspectives. Volunteers will facilitate audience interaction.
(2 minutes) Introduction by the moderator.
(20 minutes) First position statement and discussion centered on the first panel theme. During the first part (10 minutes), each panelist will present a brief position statement on the topic and illustrate it with concrete examples (approximately 2 minutes per topic and panelist). During the second part (10 minutes), the panelists will engage in a discussion addressing their different perspectives and selected questions from the audience.
(60 minutes) Remaining themes. The second, third, and fourth themes will follow the same 20-minute format.
(8 minutes) Concluding remarks. Each panelist will revisit their general position statement on the topic and propose an open question and/or future direction for the community to address.
Participation and Engagement
This 90-minute panel is designed to foster active participation and open debate, combining short position statements with curated discussion across the panel’s four themes. Audience members will be invited to submit questions and reflections via a dedicated Discord space, allowing moderators to surface diverse perspectives and guide the conversation in real time.
The Discord server will be organized into channels aligned with each panel theme, as well as a general channel (https://discord.gg/p7GgeU784y). Participants can post questions, respond to others, and use reactions to highlight topics they find particularly compelling. Moderators will draw on these contributions to shape the live discussion.
Engagement will continue beyond the panel. The Discord space will remain open after the session, enabling ongoing dialogue, follow-up questions, and resource sharing between attendees and panelists.
Panel Organization
Panelist and Organizer
Ana Tajadura-Jiménez She is an Associate Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M). She leads the i_mBODY lab (www.imbodylab.com), working at the intersection of HCI, neuroscience, and AI. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded BODYinTRANSIT and SENSEBEAT-DS projects, both focused on multisensory technologies that alter body perception and drive changes in emotion, behavior, and health.
Panelists
Kristi Kuusk is a Senior Researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA), where she leads the Sensorial Design group. Her research explores how design—through clothing, materials, and technologies—can foster sensorial, emotional, and ecological well-being at the intersection of sustainable fashion, craftsmanship, and smart textile innovation.
Kristina Höök is a Professor in Interaction Design at the Royal Institute of Technology KTH in Stockholm. She works on soma design – a feminist, non-dualistic, somaesthetic design approach. Soma design is an approach to interaction design that starts from bodily sensations, using somatic (body-focused) practices to guide the creation of technologies and experiences. It emphasizes cultivating sensitivity to movement, perception, and emotion so designers can shape more meaningful, aesthetic and ethical interactions.
Pedro Lopes is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, Director of the Human Computer Integration Lab (lab.plopes.org). His work focuses on integrating interfaces with the human body—exploring interface paradigms that supersede wearables. These devices augment the body not only cognitively but also physically.
Mel Slater is a Distinguished Investigator at the University of Barcelona in the Institute of Neurosciences, and co-Director of the Event Lab. He has been involved in research in virtual reality since the early 1990s and his work has concentrated on both technical developments in VR and contributions to the understanding of presence and the cognitive neuroscience of body ownership and agency. He is a co-Founder of Kiin.tech, and coordinator of the European Metaverse Research Network, with a long-standing commitment to advancing interdisciplinary VR research.
Moderator and Organizer
Elena Márquez Segura is a design researcher in the i_mBODY lab at UC3M. Her work focuses on designing and studying playful, technology-supported experiences for collocated physical and social action, and on embodied design methods that facilitate their design. Currently, she works with wearables and immersive technologies in health and well-being contexts, especially physical training and rehabilitation.
Moderator
Laia Turmo Vidal is an interaction design researcher and postdoc at KTH Royal Institute of Technology developing body-centric and critical approaches to design for health and well-being. Her work explores how interactive technologies (such as biofeedback devices, soft haptic wearables, and interactive machine learning tools) can positively transform body experiences in contexts of physical activity, rehabilitation, and chronic conditions.
Acknowledgments
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101002711). LTV acknowledges the funding from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (IS24-0139) Soma Design Interaction With Soft Haptics.
