SYNAPSE & Bioadaptive media at Nordic Pre-CHI 2026

While we eagerly await CHI in April 2026, Nordic Pre-CHI event at Aalto University was a unique opportunity to connect, familiarise with others’ works, and get insights on how to improve presentations for the “real thing”. However, the Pre-CHI is in some ways more of a real thing due to its smaller setting than the main event with thousands of attendees. The event chairs, Robin Welsch and Verena Distler, did an amazing job at creating a dynamic and welcoming gathering.

On March 18th, I had the pleasure of being one of the representatives of the Research Centre of Gameful Realities from Tampere University, with a trial run presentation of SYNAPSE: A Sociotechnical Taxonomy of Bioadaptive Media. This paper conceptualises and interrogates bioadaptive media (what do you get if you merge AI, media, and psychophysiology, and why does it even matter?) at the intersection of HCI, STS, and media studies.

Over the past years, there has been a steady rise in systems that adapt to users’ physiological signals, such as heart rate, skin conductance, and EEG. Indeed, most of us today have a smart watch or ring with a range of biosensing capabilities, continuously tracking how we feel, eat, and move. Systems incorporating such measurements are often considered through concepts such as perceptive, adaptive, or personalised, and are typically evaluated in terms of how accurately they can detect and react to users’ internal states, or what kind of effects they might have on, for example, learning or gameplay. However, relying on existing concepts misses the unique aspect of the intimate coupling of ourselves and media as creating a unique human experience and relationship with the technology and media. This is where the analysis needs to extend beyond technical performance and into questions of interpretation, normativity, and embedded power.

In our CHI 2026 paper, we conceptualise bioadaptive media and argue that they should be understood not only as technical artefacts, but as sociotechnical systems, and that such framing could, and should, reshape the future research agenda. Specifically, we reviewed existing taxonomies and applications, and applied a critical lens to build a framework for interrogating the system Objective, Logic, and User Agency at different sociotechnical levels, namely Artefact, Organisational, and Socio-Political and Ontological. What becomes visible through this framing is, firstly, that systems that appear quite different on the surface can share similar underlying structures. A system optimising engagement and one optimising arousal, for example, may rely on comparable feedback logics and similarly position the user as a subject of regulation. The differences are often less about the signals or themselves or other implementation details and more about the assumptions and goals encoded into the system. At the level of the Artefact, the focus is on the technical system itself — for example, how physiological signals are interpreted and how reliably they can stand in for complex experiential states. At the Organisational level, attention shifts to the contexts in which these systems are deployed, including the incentives, goals, and power relations that shape their design and use. Finally, at the Socio-political level, the analysis considers longer-term and more systemic implications, such as how these systems may contribute to normalising particular affective states or reshaping users’ sense of agency and self-understanding in unpredictable ways. This 3×3 matrix was then used to analyse three speculative examples, representing plausible, near-future applications that extend current trends in immersive journalism, digital mind-altering, and agent-facilitated collaborative VR.

What this layered perspective makes visible is that many of the issues associated with bioadaptive media do not originate at a single level. Simplifications in signal interpretation at the technical level, for instance, can become reinforced through organisational priorities, and eventually stabilise as broader norms about what counts as appropriate emotion or behaviour. What this layered perspective makes visible is how relatively small technical assumptions can become stabilised as broader norms about emotion, behaviour, and experience. At the same time, we hope that SYNAPSE provides a valuable starting point for afuture research agenda and in-depth examinations of domain specific media systems.

See the full paper ahead of print HERE.

If you want to say hi, check out the CHI program and add this presentation to your conference calendar HERE, or write to me at mila.bujic@tuni.fi

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Bujić, M., & Hamari, J. (2026). SYNAPSE: A Sociotechnical Taxonomy of Bioadaptive Media. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3757552

Funding: This research was supported by the Academy of Finland (342144; ’POSTEMOTION’ / 359173; ’UNITE Flagship’) and Kone Foundation (02008478; ’DIAL’).

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Event picture by Shivang Gupta.