Kristina Höök is Professor of Interaction Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where she leads the Somaesthetic Design Research Group. Her central contribution is soma design — a design practice, set out in Designing with the Body: Somaesthetic Interaction Design (MIT Press, 2018), which holds that designers must cultivate their own bodily sensitivity before they can design technology that engages movement and felt experience well. Her work matters to somatic AI because it addresses a question that motion-generation research has largely left aside: not how to model a body from outside, but how the designer's own perceptual training shapes what a system can engage with at all.

This is a source-verified profile, not an interview. It is assembled from published work and public institutional sources. No direct interview was conducted and no dialogue is reconstructed.

Position and affiliation

Höök holds a professorship in Interaction Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and directs the Somaesthetic Design Research Group there. Her research spans affective interaction, somaesthetic design, and the Internet of Things, with a stated aim of making life with technology more meaningful, creative and aesthetically engaging by centring design on the soma — the living, sentient, perceiving body — rather than on reasoning and language alone.

What soma design proposes

Designing with the Body (MIT Press, 2018) sets out the theory behind soma design along with its motivations, methods and tools, and includes an account of Höök's own design process and examples of what she terms soma design encounters. Its central move is to reincorporate body and movement into a design tradition that has, in her account, long privileged language and logic over perception and sensation.

The book closes with a manifesto section challenging interaction designers to restart the field around bodies and perception rather than intellect. The publisher's description characterises this as a call to focus on "bodies and perception rather than reasoning and intellect" — a framing that positions soma design as a reorientation of the discipline rather than an addition to it.

The methodological claim is the demanding part. Soma design does not treat bodily sensitivity as background knowledge a designer can read about. It treats it as a capacity the designer must actively cultivate through their own practice, on the grounds that a designer cannot design for qualities of experience they have not learned to notice in themselves.

Why this matters for somatic AI

Höök's position bears directly on a limitation this platform has traced repeatedly through 2026. Motion AI systems are typically built by researchers whose expertise is in modelling bodies from the outside — from video, from motion capture, from joint trajectories. The qualities that somatic practice works with are not straightforwardly available from that vantage point, a gap that became measurable when a robotics benchmark showed vision-based control systems failing under physical human contact because they process what a robot sees rather than what it feels.

Soma design offers a methodological answer that is independent of sensing hardware. Better sensors extend what a system can detect; cultivated perception in the designer determines what anyone thinks to look for. These are different problems, and the second has received far less attention in motion AI than the first. Höök's argument implies that a research team without trained bodily sensitivity will build systems that miss qualities its members cannot themselves perceive — regardless of instrumentation.

This also situates a broader lineage. The argument that computing must be built from embodied knowing rather than merely about the body has been developed across several decades of interaction design research, including the work profiled here on somatic strategies in machine design. Höök's contribution is to have formalised it as a teachable design methodology with published methods rather than leaving it as an orientation.

Where to read further

  • Designing with the Body: Somaesthetic Interaction Design (MIT Press, 2018) — the primary source for soma design theory and method, available through MIT Press Direct.
  • "Soma Design: On Articulation, Materiality, Politics, and the Body. Interview with Kristina Höök" — a published interview in Diseña, an open-access peer-reviewed design journal, indexed in DOAJ. Readers wanting Höök in her own words should go to this source rather than to secondary summaries.

References

Höök, K. (2018). Designing with the body: Somaesthetic interaction design. MIT Press. https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4131/Designing-with-the-BodySomaesthetic-Interaction

Höök, K. (2018). Designing with the body: Somaesthetic interaction design [Publisher page]. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262551465/designing-with-the-body/

Soma design: On articulation, materiality, politics, and the body. Interview with Kristina Höök. Diseña. https://ojs.uc.cl/index.php/Disena/article/view/47987