Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. TEI ‘22, February 13–16, 2022, Daejeon, Republic of Korea © 2022 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9147-4/22/02 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3490149.3502255 ABSTRACT Through this pictorial, I propose a generative method for the elicitation of autoethnographic themes for design research. This dialogue with tangible traces uses photography in conversation with tangible body maps (TBMs) towards harvesting evocative content for exploration. This dialogical tool functions as a way of generating conceptual knowledge inspired by the self and environment, including other subjectivities. This dialogue with tangible traces contributes to frst-person design research, where traceability and communicability of outcomes become necessary preconditions for rigour. Although systematic, this method also respects the non- prescriptive and drifting nature of design. Authors Keywords HCI;soma design; frst-person methods; design methods. CSS Concepts • Human-centered computing •Interaction design • Interaction design process and methods Dialoguing with Tangible Traces: A Method to Elicit Autoethnographic Narratives Claudia Núñez-Pacheco KTH Royal Institute of Technology Digital Futures Stockholm, Sweden claudia2@kth.se INTRODUCTION FROM BODY TO ENVIRONMENT As research focused on frst-person experiences is becoming more prevalent in HCI [14], researchers have started to venture into employing methods to access a more detailed articulation of embodied sensations and feelings to inform design. The use of autobiographical tools combined with workshops with participants is becoming a common methodological choice in the feld [20]. When working with participants, body maps [7,23] and art-oriented open-ended tools [1,2] are generally used to surface subjective experience around a given topic. Additionally, narratives have been used by researchers to describe their autoethnographic experiences [19,21]. Although these methodological approaches are rich and afford a multifaceted range of expressiveness, sometimes it is not easy to put them into an active conversation with one another, potentially missing the opportunity to surface unexpected themes. This pictorial presents a generative and designerly way of dialoguing with workshop outcomes involving using open-ended tools called tangible body maps (onwards TBMs). These tools are put in conversation with photographs curated by the researcher to elicit autoethnographic content and potentially new research themes. TBMs derive from traditional body mapping [7], which are used to symbolise feelings and sensations around corporeal experience. In addition, TBMs are sculptural representations of such experiences, emerging as an additional level of abstraction from traditional body maps. These resulting abstractions symbolise relevant aspects of experiencing, which are used as starting points to expand emerging topics, from the body to environment. In this dialogical method, TBMs acts as the stepping stone for a generative conversation, where photographs are integrated to elicit new themes. Methods emerging from HCI such as performative photography [15] and ideation through natureculture [18] use both photos to scaffold conceptual knowledge for design by taking advantage of the relations between humans and more- than-human agents. Dialoguing with TBMs falls within the same tradition, however establishing a link with designerly manifestations created by the researcher and others towards foregrounding personal narratives. In most cases, TBMs are created by participants. However, instead of focusing on reconstructing the participants’ stories, this method uses them as provocations to elicit unexpected frst-person refections. With the rise of interest for frst-person methods in HCI [13,14,19,20,21], there is a need for more rigorous yet designerly ways of doing research [14]. By designerly, I refer to methods that use refection in action, a type of engagement intertwined with the creative interaction with materials [4]. Additionally, design practice values open-endedness as part of its activity [4,16]. In the case of frst-person research methods, rigour is granted by the ability of the researcher to systematically articulate and communicate the generative reasoning behind her decisions [30], in this case, to the design community. By dialoguing with projective manifestations of peoples’ experiences, the goal of this method is to elicit access to the procedural aspects of our own reasoning and imagining. Other methods such as photographic elicitation [12], experience sampling [17], and microphenomenology [25] are grounded in a similar principle of scaffolding frst-person experience systematically, although without the designerly quality of the dialogue proposed in this pictorial. Additionally, TBMs use the bodily dimension of others as a point of articulation of experience. This is