Sustainable Body Transformation Experiences

HCI is increasingly shaped by technologies that transform how people perceive, inhabit, and act with their bodies. Decades of research across psychology, neuroscience, somaesthetics, and HCI show that bodily experience is flexible and continually shifting, and that sensory, material, and computational interventions can open new ways of perceiving, sensing, moving, acting, and making sense of and with your body. As these transformations enter everyday life—through shape-changing wearables, computational textiles, sensory-augmentation devices, and immersive mixed reality—a central challenge emerges: how might designers support sustainable Body Transformation Experiences that matter without assuming change must be linear, lasting, or predictable? This panel brings together HCI experts with distinct yet complementary perspectives to examine what "sustainability" means for transformative body technologies. Bridging empirical science, somaesthetic design, material innovation, and VR research, the panel explores four themes—Experience, Materiality, Everyday Integration, and Ethics/Politics—to articulate pathways for technologies that support meaningful, inclusive, ethically-grounded transformations of embodied experience.