IFM2026 | Sensing Prāṇa: Breath as Trace – A Speculative Encounter with Sensing by Anupama Gowda

This paper examines Sensing Prāṇa, a design-based research project that explored what occurs when breath is sensed without being converted into guidance, evaluation, or diagnosis. At a moment when wearable and sensing technologies increasingly translate breathing into data intended to shape behavior, the project asked a deliberately modest question: what becomes visible when breath is sensed without determining in advance what it should signify?

Rather than advancing critique through analysis alone, the project proceeded through a practice-based inquiry. It took the form of a small participatory installation in which participants exhaled into a pinwheel connected to a CO₂ sensor. Each interaction produced a printed “breathprint” that paired a numerical value with text that explicitly refused interpretation. Participants were informed that the output was neither a diagnosis nor an assessment, but a trace produced through sensing.

The installation was intentionally restrained. It offered no visualizations of trends, no feedback loops, and no suggestions for improvement. Instead, it introduced a pause between bodily action and meaning. By slowing the movement from sensation to interpretation, the project foregrounded a largely invisible moment in contemporary sensing systems: the point at which bodily signals are made to stand in for knowledge. Breath was registered, but its significance remained open.

The paper reflects on how participants encountered this withholding of explanation. Some returned repeatedly, unsettled by the absence of instruction. Others experienced the interaction as reflective or contemplative. What emerged was not consensus about the meaning of breath, but an awareness of how deeply sensing practices are shaped by expectations of usefulness, optimization, and control. When these expectations were suspended, participants were left to reckon with their own desire to see breath rendered visible at all.

Rather than proposing an alternative system of measurement, Sensing Prāṇa argues for a different orientation toward sensing technologies. It treats design as a way of composing conditions for attention and reflection, rather than solutions or prescriptions. By holding breath as something that can be sensed without being resolved, the project suggests that uncertainty itself may offer a generative space for thinking about bodies, technologies, and care.

Breath as Technology: Histories of Bodies, Devices, and Embodied Computation

Twenty-Second International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society Human-Centered AI Transformations The University of The Aegean, Rhodes, Greece, 16-17 April 2026

This paper explores the historical and cultural evolution of breath as a site of technological intervention, tracing its transformation from ancient practices to contemporary wearable devices. Rooted in early medical techniques such as tracheotomy and inhalation therapies, breath management technologies have long mediated the boundary between body and environment. With the industrial era came the development of anesthetic delivery systems and mechanical ventilation, expanding the ways breath could be measured, controlled, and supported. Today, wearable technologies such as respiratory sensors and mindfulness apps continue this lineage, reframing breath as a quantifiable and governable process. Using a critical technocultural approach and speculative design as a method, this research examines how bodies, devices, and interfaces historically constructed the mediation and measurement of breath, culminating in the contemporary landscape of embodied computation. It investigates the ethical, social, and infrastructural tensions that have persisted across eras: between open and closed systems of access to bodily data, between public health and private monitoring, and between human needs and machine design. By historicising breath as both a biological necessity and a technological artifact, this study highlights the ways societies produce technologies and how, in turn, technologies reconstitute bodies and subjects. Ultimately, the project invites a rethinking of contemporary breath-based wearables not as isolated innovations but as continuations of long-standing architectures of control, care, and computation embedded within the human experience of breath.

Undisciplined Design: Risks, Challenges, Limitations and Strategies for Navigating through Chaos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2025

Mapping project alignment: a case study of using concept maps to analyse shared understanding in a multi-disciplinary long-term creative practice project

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2025

Digitally Framed Bodies : The Role of Habitual Interfaces in Designing Aesthetic Perceptions in Digital Fitness.

RAW 2024, UT Dallas

Needles to Say: Women Quilters’ Narratives from the Past, Present, and Future with the Coming of Creative Technology for Creative Industries in India.

Interactive Film & Media Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2, June 2023

Abstract
Story telling and informal learning is passed down generations and has been recognized as one of the best approaches to human evolution and development. One such form of story telling and informal learning is evident in folk quilting which has an extensive history throughout the world. This living tradition is a symbol of care, comfort, and inspiration within the community. Social values; care, patience, connectedness and sisterhood are central to the form. With the growing global market, native folk quilters are approached by the creative industries with a certain sense of urgency. With market driven production care and collaboration are in question due to digital penetration in rural Indian quilters. The younger generation in the quilting communities are interested in other revenue generating opportunities as opposed to expanding the form. Traditional folk quilters struggle with technological adoption as they are threatened to survive and sustain the purity of the indigenous form and are now further challenged to impart their sense of effective passing down of traditions to their younger generation with the care different from their own given the diminishing interest in the younger generation.

STEAM-Science Technology Engineering Arts and Mathematics education is an on-going project in rural Karnataka, India is creating conditions for better understanding and contextual experiential learning for developing STEAM mindset in middle, secondary schoolers and the extended parent communities. This project is being implemented through Gram Panchayat (public) libraries since 2021 with the support of Rural Development and Panchayat Raj (RDPR) . In this paper, I present a possible addition to the existing STEAM-Ed manual to assist facilitators in the libraries and NGOs working with quilter communities to explore transdisciplinary methodologies to bridge the veteran quilters to the next generation by an artistic exploration using mobile technology to work through art history, folk feminist ethnography, cultural studies, ethno-mathematics, ethno-engineering, and creative coding to break the dominant narratives through STEAM-Ed program.

Halasuru Traverses: Alternative Local Histories

From the journal Digital Culture & Societyhttps://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2020-0113

Vatara Shaales: Evidence for an Arts-integrated Investment for Continued Learning in Community Schools during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Karnataka, India

This paper outlines the experiences of Yuva Chintana Foundation (YCF) in rolling out a STEM education programme supported by IBM and Quest Alliance in the state of Karnataka during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The government of Karnataka announced a community schooling initiative titled Vidyagama to prevent a sustained break in the education of students from vulnerable communities who are at risk of dropping out of school. This paper outlines many of the methods used in these community schools or Vatara Shaales, drawing attention to the use of the arts in 1) connecting various members of the community by helping them make sense of what is happening around them through the process of sharing and reflecting on their collective experiences, 2) making lessons interesting, 3) learning new digital skills, 4) providing context and relevance to local art forms and traditions and 5) building a pool of resources who can teach an arts-integrated STEM curriculum in these economically “backward” and vulnerable districts.

fab educators pilot programme at workbench projects: Government School Theatre teachers leverage digital fabrication for fab 2.0

https://archive.org/details/Fab12GowdaKumar/page/n6/mode/2up

Educators have long-standing experience using FabLabs in many parts of the globe. In India FabLabs are at a nascent stage and available for a small community of informed users, mostly in urban settings. Workbench Projects (WP), a young FabLab/Makerspace in Bangalore, made its first headway working with a select group of government school ‘theatre teachers’ under its pilot initiative of the Fab Educators Programme. Teachers became the ground zero of this project because they represent a small but committed group of individuals in the system. This paper attempts to share some key processes that were set in place in selection of teacher participants, designing, preparation, conducting and reviewing the workshop. Continuation of this orientation towards a more immersive, and self-directed engagement has been charted by the teacher participants themselves as the next plan of action towards building Fab2.0 in their own small workspaces with the support of Workbench Projects along with both the central and state government

ARTS EDUCATION POSITION PAPERS FOR PRE-SERVICE TEACHER TRAINERS

One major success for the work I did at india foundation for the Arts was securing a long-term engagement with Department of State Education and Research Training (DSERT) that began with creating an Arts Education syllabus for the Diploma in Education (D.Ed.) teacher training programme. We were appointed for implementing the new Arts Education syllabus for teacher educators at District Institute of Education and Training (DIET) colleges, and for articulating two position papers for the D.Ed. curriculum review.

1. Aims of Education
2. Communication Skills in Pre-Service Teacher Training Programme

The outcome has been not just the two position papers, but also, a detailed D.Ed. course syllabus teacher educators’ manual and a source book.It is abundantly clear that the DSERT viewed our work through the Kali-Kalisu project as the preeminent arts education resource for the state.