The following text is taken from my concluding chapter of my doctoral thesis. It is taken somewhat out of context, but acts as an intentional text to orientate me towards future works, collaborations and encounters. It is a useful reminder of the uncertainty and doubt a PhD candidate experiences, that never really leaves. Perhaps, it might encourage others to consider the encounter-y qualities of design research and embraced their uncertainty as a superpower.
My thesis asked: what does it mean to become an embodied designer—or to be an embodied designer in a state of becoming? The question deliberately resisted treating the embodied designer as a stable identity that could be acquired through practice. Drawing on Gail Weiss’s account of intercorporeality, subjectivity—and embodiment through body images—is continually formed through encounters with human and non-human others. Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientation similarly reminds us that bodies take form through what they turn toward and what they move away from. An embodied designer does not precede practice; designer subjectivity is constituted and reconfigured through intercorporeal activity. Encounters are not only a way of designing; they are sites in which designer identity emerges otherwise.
Through this research, my own experience of becoming an embodied designer has clarified the term. To be an embodied designer is to acknowledge the uncertainty that one is always ‘subject to change’. Embodiment is not an attribute to achieve, but something negotiated in practice. Encounters name this negotiation. They do not fix a designer identity; they keep it fluid. To design with encounters is therefore to remain attentive to the intercorporeal dynamics through which design knowledge emerges—situated and relational within practice.
Encounters do not function as ontological claims, diagrammatic tools for mapping relational complexity, or as visual techniques for tracking somatic change. They are not methods to apply or frameworks to implement. Rather, encounters are a strong concept emerging through practice and grounded in lived intercorporeal experience.
Designing with encounters therefore requires attunement to their qualities. The manifesto that follows is a reminder of those qualities. They are not merely conceptual categories; to inform design, they must be acknowledged and felt in the body while designing. How they are experienced will depend on the practitioner and the context in which they are practised.
Once practice is viewed through encounters—through moving, orientated, textured, amplified, intercorporeal, drifting, unpredictable, and imagined-imaginative bodies, and the spaces between—these relational dynamics become difficult to ignore. A sensitivity to their qualities brings them into awareness and makes them generative.
Practice-based research, particularly when working through the body, often involves long periods of uncertainty and doubt. During the course of this PhD I frequently questioned whether the work would result in anything that might resemble ‘original research’. I could not have imagined that my earlier research into located audio would eventually become encounters via post-phenomenological feminist theory. This state of becoming created uncertainty and yet, as I have said before, I found comfort in drifting where the research and my body took me. The strong concept of encounters emerged gradually as I tried to make sense of what I was doing. In part, it arose in response to the precarity, openness, and long stretches of uncertainty indicative of being a PhD student.
Throughout this work, how I designed with my body constantly evolved. I remain unsure whether finding knowledge through embodied practice is more or less complex than other forms of research. At times it felt difficult because the outcomes were not immediately definable or legible, relying on the trust I placed in my felt experience. I recognise now that unpredictability is not a flaw of designing with encounters, but one of its generative qualities. I mention this because the uncertainty of a PhD can feel unsettling and sometimes paralysing. I hope that my experience of designing with encounters offers some reassurance that drifting and unpredictability can also be part of how knowledge takes form, whatever embodied designer you may become.
To be an embodied designer is to never actually arrive, but to remain in a state of continual encountering and drifting. It is to remain open to the possibility of further encounters without forcing an outcome. It is to accept that one’s practice, subjectivity, and morphology is continually re-constituted in relation to others.
As my stepping project in Chapter 3 has shown, encounters can also emerge as the outcome of design practice. Designing through the conceptual lens of encounters may allow some of their qualities to transfer into the experiences of those we design for, mediated through the designer’s own lived experience while designing. It is also my hope that the strong concept of encounters encourages outcomes that invite both end-users and designers to explore and experiment with their bodies in playful and unpredictable ways.
