Abstract
My research responds to the growing turn in experience design towards approaches which emphasise the use of bodies — both the designers’ and participants’ or users’ — to work through design problems. Employing an autobiographical methodology, I investigate what it means to be an embodied designer by taking part in distinct embodied practices such as walking, actor training and routesetting for indoor climbing. This chapter focuses on my research in routesetting, the practice of designing indoor climbing routes through the placement of holds on artificial walls. Can routesetters’ skill in creating problems for bodies help the field of experience design solve its problem with bodies?
This chapter asks what route setting can teach embodied design about tuning into and working with our bodies and other bodies. I draw on post-phenomenological feminist theory and introduce ‘encounters’ as a thematic and methodological principle with which to understand embodiment from the perspective of multiple bodies in design practice and to think about the transferability of experience between and amongst different bodies.
Sarah Ahmed emphasises the spatiality and historicity of experiences with objects and others, seeing these not as interactions in a vacuum, but as embodied encounters ‘coming from different sides, as well as having different sides’ (Ahmed 2006, 8). Engaging with Gail Weiss’ concept of intercorporeality, we can explore the multiplicity of sides that ‘exists within and not just between our bodies’ (Weiss 1999, 169), where each encounter is an opportunity to rediscover ones’ body anew. Through the lens of design activities as encounters, can route setting offer a new way of understanding embodied design practice? Can encounters, and their principal characteristics, in turn, be used to surface new ways of understanding routesetting as an embodied practice?
Reference
Robinson, Scott. ‘Design as Encounters’. Paper presented at Designing for Bodies: Practices, Imaginaries and Discourses, Kolding, Denmark. Book of Abstracts, 2025.