Kristi Kuusk, Michaela Honauer, and Seçil Uğur Yavuz
While brainstorming creates a space for the mind to generate ideas mainly based on dialogue and visual-verbal expressions, bodystorming as an embodied design practice puts the body in the centre of exploration to generate ideas through interaction with probes and materials. The workshop combines these two design activities and suggests ideating with the environment by moving in it. Walking as a methodology is often used in ethnography to generate knowledge through embodied experience. Besides, artists walk to engage with the environmentin an artistic way while also positioning the moving body in performance-like settings in the public sphere. The workshop builds upon these techniques common in other disciplines and opens up an experimental space for designing while being in dialogue with the environment and situated things during the design process.
Prior to the workshop, the participants explore a selected environment and generate design ideas by moving in it. Different from sedentary methods, moving allows participants to encounter unexpected and thought-provoking things and perspectives and, therefore, provides an alternative dimension to the body and ideation. The participants document their experiences and discuss the results of this embodied posthuman design practice in the workshop.
Keywords: design through movement, embodied design ideation, make walking strange, somaesthetic-inspired design, design with the ecosystem
RSD: Methods, Methodology & Theory, Socioecological Design
Organisers
Kristi Kuusk is a senior researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts looking into how clothing and textile fields could become more sustainable when enhanced with technology. She works towards the direction of supportive and caring clothing enabled by playful interactions. www.kristikuusk.com
Contact: Kristi Kuusk, PhD, Estonian Academy of Arts, Sensorial Design group, www.artun.ee, kristi.kuusk@artun.ee
Michaela Honauer is a postdoc design researcher at the University of Twente (the Netherlands) investigating how humans (re)shape their relationships with/through emerging, AI-enabled technologies. Her methodological approach draws on participatory and embodied methods, speculative and performative interventions, and post-phenomenological theories. https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaela-honauer/
Contact: Michaela Honauer, PhD, University of Twente, HMI Group, The Netherlands, contact@mihoo.de
Seçil Uğur Yavuz is an associate professor and the study course director of Eco-Social Design Master at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Faculty of Design and Art. Through participatory design and co-design methods, her research aims to open debate and stimulate new visions of interaction within the entanglement of our social and technological spheres towards sustainable and desirable future(s).
Contact: Seçil Uğur Yavuz, PhD, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Faculty of Design and Art, https://www.unibz.it/en/faculties/design-art/, secil.uguryavuz@unibz.it
Acknowledgements
We thank the master of eco-social design students (unibz) who carried out a walkstorming session in the Design Research lecture as an exercise. The exercise provided them with an initial stage to develop their research questions while doing a walkstorming session in a group setting.