Workshop | Somatic City: Chicago

We’re excited to announce Somatic City: Chicago, the first chapter of what we hope will become an ongoing workshop series exploring cities through the body. Taking place at DePaul University from August 7 to 9, 2026, the workshop will invite participants to experience Chicago not only through what they see, but also through what their bodies sense, register, and reveal while moving through the city.

On the first day, participants will take part in both guided and free-form urban walks while wearing a portable biosensing rig. EEG, heart-rate and HRV sensing, and electrodermal activity monitoring will capture changes in attention, arousal, and physiological response as participants encounter different streets, environments, and rhythms across Chicago. Together, these signals will offer another lens for reading the city—one grounded in embodied experience rather than observation alone.

The following two days will shift from sensing to making. During a hands-on hackathon, participants will work with the data gathered during their walks and explore how it might be transformed into interactive experiences, speculative tools, and new ways of imagining urban futures. How might a city look when mapped through stress, attention, or bodily activation? What kinds of design questions emerge when our own physiology becomes part of the urban interface?

The workshop is organized by Mirna Zordan, LeAnne Wagner, and David Ramsay, bringing together perspectives from physiological computing, embodied HCI, urban sensing, and interaction design. We are grateful to DePaul University for hosting the workshop and to Macrotellect–Brainwave Technology & BrainLink for supporting the biosensing activities.

Chicago will be our first stop—and hopefully only the beginning. We can’t wait to walk, sense, build, and imagine the city together. ✨