What does it mean to become an embodied designer—or to be an embodied designer in a continual state of becoming? This practice-based PhD responds to the growing shift in design towards approaches that emphasise the use of bodies—both designers’ and participants’—to work through design problems. Drawing on feminist post-phenomenology, particularly relational accounts of embodiment in the work of Gail Weiss (1999) and Sara Ahmed (2000), I conduct auto-ethnographic research in collaboration with somatic practitioners, including performer trainers and indoor climbing routesetters. I propose and test encounters as a strong concept for expanding and articulating embodied design practices, re-envisioning design activities as encounters: intercorporeal sites of practice dynamically, socially, culturally, spatially, and temporally constituted in, through, and alongside participating bodies.
Historically, design has relied on phenomenology and postmodernism to conceptualise the body, risking generalisation and the neutralisation of embodied subjectivity. Conventional ideation methods such as scenarios, storyboards, and experience mapping also limit the agency and creativity of the bodies involved. By contrast, somaesthetic and feminist approaches centralise lived experience and render bodies generative material in design practice. While the term encounter appears in design literature to evoke the richness of lived experience, it remains under-defined. Responding to this gap, I ask how the concept of encounters might enable embodied design to account for the relationality and in-betweenness of embodiment across the bodies of designers and participants; what embodied design can learn about bodies from post-phenomenological feminist theory; how designers can acknowledge and negotiate their own embodied subjectivity; and what performer training, routesetting, and the concept of the drift (Smith 2010) can teach designers about tuning into and working with our bodies and the bodies of others.
These questions are pursued through two practice projects: Stepping: With Performer Trainers, a collaboration with Dr Göze Saner exploring performer training without physical co-presence; and Climbing: With Routesetters, a first-person study of routesetting at Mile End Wall in East London. Both practices, under-researched in the field of design, exemplify body-first, relational forms of somatic expertise through which Design Encounters are realised.
In Chapter One, I introduce my research and my research questions. I situate my research within the fields of embodied and somaesthetic design. Against Paul Dourish’s outward-facing account of embodiment as situated interaction, and Höök’s inward-facing somaesthetic approach, I identify a gap in how design could orientate towards the body and the bodies of others, proposing the concept of encounter as an alternative. Using the metaphor of the mongrel I describe my cross-disciplinary practice grounded in experience design. I describe my research methodology emerging from a series of early embodied experiments drawing together a range of embodied and reflective approaches; walking and drifting as spatial practices; embodied ideation; multimodal documentation; and textural reflexivity as a mode of critical reflection. I introduce ideas and bodily practices that are foundational to the practice research that follows. These include the use of theatre studios, Wizard of Oz and lo-fi technology to create responsive environments for prototyping, and indoor climbing as a subject of research.
In Chapter Two, I look at how experience is understood as both phenomenon and material within the field of experience design, highlighting how design draws from other fields to achieve this. I challenge the somewhat neutral or absent representation of bodies in these theories, particularly phenomenology. I also question whether interaction or experience is an appropriate container for my own understanding of how I use my body and the bodies of others in my own practice. Drawing on post-phenomenological feminist theory, particularly Sara Ahmed’s concepts of orientation and strange encounters and Gail Weiss’ intercorporeality I define and inform a set of visceral embodied metaphors to challenge biases to which neutralised and universalised representations of the body in design are susceptible. I propose encounters as more appropriate for my practice, presenting it as a strong concept (Höök and Löwgren 2012) and conceptual frame for this research. Finally, I contextualise my own research in relation to other embodied designers and researchers looking at early examples of embodied ideation through to practitioners drawing on somatic and feminist design approaches.
In Chapter Three, I discuss and reflect on an embodied design project in collaboration with theatre practitioner and academic Dr Göze Saner, where we explored alternative approaches to performer training that did not require or rely on the presence of a tutor. I discuss the project and our collaborative process to further my understanding of ‘encounters’ as a framework for embodied design and to deepen my view of bodies as sites and generative materials of design practice. I reflect on how bodies can be used to ideate intercorporeally in ways that go beyond scripted scenarios, through encounters that accept them as monstrous, amplified and imaginary, and reflect on the embodied function and impact of various technologies, tools and roles.
In Chapter Four, I conduct a first-person study of routesetting for indoor climbing as an embodied and somatic practice from three unique and complementary positions. Working with the team at Mile End Climbing Wall, I observe professional routesetters as they use their skills to design climbing problems for other bodies to solve. I listen to the amplified sounds of my own body, and groups of other climbers, as we climb the problems we have been set. Finally, as a routesetter-in-training, I do routesetting myself. Through these positionalities I investigate the effectiveness of encounters and their characteristics as a conceptual frame within and reflecting on practice. I explore how encounters and their principal characteristic can be used to surface new ways of understanding routesetting as an embodied practice. I explore what routesetting could teach embodied designers about tuning into and working with our own bodies and other bodies.
In Chapter Five, I summarise the findings of my research and reflect on the contribution of encounter as both a strong concept and conceptual frame for embodied design. I draw on my critical review of design theory and practice, together with my two practice-based research projects to demonstrate how encounters offer an alternative container to challenge neutral, universal, or overly abstract accounts of the body in design. I emphasise how encounters foreground subjectivity, intercorporeality, and the unpredictability of embodied practice, rendering bodies and the space between bodies as generative sites of embodied design practice. I then return to my research questions and reflect on where I stand in relation to the central question of this research: what it means to be an embodied designer in a state of becoming. Finally, I consider the implications of encounters for embodied design research more broadly, reflecting on how the concept might be taken up in other practices and contexts, before concluding the thesis with a manifesto for designing with encounters.
