Núñez-Pacheco, C. and Rosén, A. P. 2024. Articulating Felt Senses for More-Than-Human Design: A Viewpoint for Noticing. In Proc. of the ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '24). ACM, 1029–1043. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661554

Context: Anton is having a stroll outside at a house in the countryside when he sees a group of mushrooms. He is delighted by their rich multi-sensory appearance and is overflown by an urge to touch them. However, he does not want to get dirty fingers and instead takes out his smartphone and takes two pictures of the mushrooms. He then puts back the smartphone in his pocket and continues the walk. The following excerpts summarise this event, particularly focusing on the conficting urges Anton experiences as the actions unfold.

An urge of picking. Anton describes how the act of taking pictures is preceded by the identification of "nice" qualities in the mushrooms that result in a feeling or urge of wanting to collect a mushroom by picking it: “It’s sort of building up like ‘This is nice. This aspect of the mushroom is’ nice’, like, ‘oh, nice, nice, nice’ and then there are just so many nice things spilling out. So you’re like, I must document that. This is significant. /. . . / Just before the moment when I’m deciding to take a picture and reach for my phone. I’m like, literally taking a mental picture of it. I’m like, kind of registering this experience as a moment, that is kind of a picture moment ‘this is something to take a picture of’. And that kind of leaves a memory in my brain. So the memory is really enforced."

Anton describes this memory in more detail: Vivid snappability. “It feels like you can really kind of snap the mushroom, so it’s kind of porous, but kind of snappable. At the same time, it was dissolving from below. The mushroom was turning into this liquid ink that is kind of very black or dark. And it’s a very interesting contrast that it can be dissolving liquid and at the same time a kind of very feshy snappable thing. It is connected with the smell of a mushroom forest, but not the mushroom you would eat, it’s more kind of poisonous feeling."

He then describes how the rich vivid qualities of the mushroom make him want to touch it: An urge to touch the mess. "So I have this urge that I want to kind of interact with the mushroom. But I don’t want to kind of put my whole self in it /. . . / because If I would have messy fingers, I would not be able to use my phone./. . . / I mean, it’s really nice. If you just get into it is like playing with dirt with clay, like, almost childlike, that is really nice at the moment. But then you know, like, afterwards you come out of it you will be like, ‘oh, now I’m all messy’. And the moment is gone. ‘Was it worth it?’/. . . / So that’s a very strong argument for not causing this mess. And that’s also something that led me to the thought of the phone [as it would allow interaction with the mushroom without direct physical contact]."

The partial satisfaction of taking a picture. Anton describes how his felt sense changes as he picks up his smartphone and starts to focus on taking a picture: “And then suddenly, I’m only seeing the screen and the mushroom. And it’s kind of fat, the experience is fattened. So this image down here is kind of vivid 3D (points at where the mushrooms would be) but here it is fatter (points at where he would hold the phone)/ /. . . /. So I interact with the mushroom through my phone [by taking a picture]. So that is partly satisfying. But I also have this sensation of not like fully living in the moment."

Finally, Anton describes how the urge was not only about physical touching but also a more abstract sense of collecting: The urge of a collecting research mind. "There is an aspect of collecting as well. I mean, you collect mushrooms. That is something you do with mushrooms. And I wanted to pick it up like just because of how it would feel, but also because picking mushrooms is something you do [as a common practice of foraging]. But instead of picking it, I can kind of pick it, picture it, with my phone. So that partly satisfies the urge or kind of collecting? Not fully, but partly. /. . . / So there my kind of research mind started. Like this is something with significance or usefulness or like, if I gather information about my environment, I could use it later. So it was this kind of analytical thing, or like ‘it should have a purpose’. Which was nice, but also kind of removed me from this more childlike feeling. Like ‘I want to touch it, I want to play with it’. So there are two very diferent parts of my being: something very childlike, who wants to get messed up, and this kind of adult researcher who is thinking like ‘’you’re going to produce something, it has a purpose, it’s going to be kind of delivered, you’re going to show it to others’ – and that was a contrast to this ‘I want to sit here, I’d like to make a mess’. But I am this adult researcher, stopping myself from being this kind of child. Then I do that adult thing, which is to take a photo of it."

A high-level view of photographing mushrooms, including noticed felt senses throughout the different stages of the experience.