Teaching Design – Infrequent Newsletter #13

Body-based Approaches to Design Education

Dear design teachers/learners and bibliography-lovers,

Thanks for subscribing (or staying subscribed) to this mailing list and following the research project!

This newsletter edition #13 is curated in collaboration with In Figuring Out – a movement for embodied knowledge in design practice & research (IFO), a global network of designers and educators, coming together with a shared urgency to form more critically inclusive design praxis, rooted in body-based design research, practice, and pedagogy. How can new body-based approaches within design pedagogy provide a portal to radical imagination and empathy? What impact might this methodology have on the development of innovative and socially responsible design practices?

We are: Emma Hoette, Sara Kaaman, Nicole Schumann-Sizaret, Susan Sentler, Emily Smith, Silvia Sfligiotti, Vivien Tauchmann, and Micaela Terk. We live and work in Sweden, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, UK, Israel-Palestine, and the Netherlands. We have been meeting since 2021, formulating methodologies that consider embodied knowledge in design practice and research.

This newsletter is split into three central themes, reflecting a selection of IFO’s inquiries.

1. Fumbling Through Disorientation: Introspection & Improvisation in Design Education
How can connecting with our individual and collective bodies help us navigate fear in unsettling times? What can the body teach us about incorporating uncertainty into our learning and doing? This section explores improvisational embodied approaches, creating sites for collective knowledge to emerge from the unknown. »Feeling into« is not only an empathic and poetic strategy, but also a socio-political stance challenging the hegemonic stronghold valuing rationality and objectivity. The classroom becomes a site of agency and discovery.

2. Embodied Learning as Decolonial Praxis: Contested Bodies and Classrooms
How does design education consolidate power behind a facade of neutrality? How can integrating learning bodies’ vulnerability, power, intersubjectivity, and relationality inform decolonial pedagogies? This section considers expanded classrooms as sites where power, privilege, and resistance are experienced and negotiated. Embodied engagement allows us to critically acknowledge the vast array of knowledge held within learning bodies. By centering these experiences, we bridge the gap between reflectivity and lived resistance.

3. Labor Choreographies & Disembodied Productivity: Feeling Our Work
How does design labor shape our relationships to our bodies, alone and together? What visceral experiences are being suppressed to maintain the facade of design efficiency, cleanliness, and seamlessness? Where does the body »go« when we perform productivity? This section offers bodily awareness as a critical tool to unpack and dismantle the commodification of our own labor. Our design labor becomes a site of social transformation through the very act of feeling into the work.

As usual, only a selection of resources that we chose together are shared in this newsletter. There are more to explore in the bibliography.

Lots of 🦙

Emma, Sara, Nicole, Susan, Emily, Silvia, Vivien, Micaela, and Lisa

Design Activities

This newsletter contains several experiential activities in-between the resources below.

Added to the bibliography

1. Fumbling Through Disorientation: Introspection & Improvisation in Design Education

Ann Cooper Albright, How to Land – Finding Ground in an Unstable World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

This book explores how connecting with our individual and collective bodies in unsettling times like the ones we are living through can help us overcome fear, develop deeper awareness, and cultivate a more grounded way of being in the world. It helped me realise how somatic work can provide a way to incorporate uncertainty into my teaching and shift my role as an educator from someone who transfers knowledge to someone who creates space for knowledge to emerge collectively from the unknown. – Silvia Sfligiotti

Exercise I: All Fours
Begin on all fours, placing your hands in a slightly turned-out position. Straighten arms and legs, lifting your pelvis towards the ceiling. Walk backwards, with your head hanging down between your arms, looking backwards. After being in this position for a couple of minutes, you will feel as if you are walking on the ceiling. It’s a perceptual advantage to see the world upside down and enjoy it.

Practice by Ann Cooper Albright’s »Exercises in Disorientation« (from How to Land, p. 72), slightly edited.

Karen O’Rourke: Walking and Mapping – Artists as Cartographers. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016.

From Debord’s psychogeography to surveillance technologies, this book gathers works of artists who challenge mapping as objective representation of spatial life. O’Rourke also shares embodied, sensory, and movement-based approaches to data collection and representation, such as wandering and playful pedestrianism. Through alternative mapping practices, the book unravels the physical, emotional, social, and political dimensions of spatial representation, and examines the ways they’re reflected in architecture and urban design decisions. Walking and Mapping looks at learning as a physical action. »Knowledge is grown along the myriad paths we take. It is an improvisatory movement – of ›going along‹ or wayfaring – that is open-ended and knows no final destination.« (Ingold 2011, see bibliography.) – Micaela Terk

Exercise II: Prompts from Wandering as Research Method

• Move at least 50% slower than your surroundings.

• Find a hiding place and observe from within.

• Form a group without speaking.

• Move against the direction of traffic.

• Find a portal to a new realm and enter.

When you return to the classroom, take 15 minutes to visualize your experience. Don’t shy away from abstract or fuzzy places. Some anchors which may be helpful:

• Moments of dominant sensations or strong sensory stimuli.

• Body parts that became central in your exploration.

• Events, surprises, or discoveries.

• Dominant textures, colors, or sounds.

• Moments of connection (or missed connection).

• Grey zones or friction areas.

• Areas of heavy circulation.

• Portals and openings.

• Policing objects.

• People in uniform.

Practice developed by Micaela Terk.

Susan Sentler and Glenna Batson: artmaking as embodied enquiry – entering the f/old. Bristol: Intellectbooks, 2025.

The fold – in its thingness – thrives simply on the impulse to change, to be other – and to create. artmaking as embodied enquiry – entering the f/old – invites the reader to explore the many dimensions of folding as an inspirational springboard for artmaking – for making any art through multiple enterings/re-enterings, a feminist lens, embracing the unknown, utilising the concept of the ›f/old‹, tethered to embodiment, challenging default modes. This book is a transdisciplinary/post-humanist recount of a growing body of work whose roots go back more than a decade of Sentler’s shared research praxis with Dr Glenna Batson titled »the f/old as somatic\artistic practice«. – Susan Sentler

Exercise III: the f/old

Sit comfortably with a writing table/surface in front of you.

• Take a piece of plain white paper (such as copy paper), and make one flat fold – one crease anywhere on the paper.

• Pause and view the folded line. Let your eye follow the fold – to, and beyond, the crease itself. Note where your imagination takes you, from the paper’s edge and beyond.

• Notice the shift in the quality of your gaze, how you are perceiving/moving as you observe a deepening as the two surfaces merge. Sense the qualities of this meeting and the spaces between and around the line.

• Allow your seeing to drift, as if the fold is an anchor, an island, floating within your site/space. Going away, coming back.

• Jot down a few notes.

Practice from artmaking as embodied enquiry – entering the f/old prelude dive (chapter 1 welcome, p. 3).

See also:
→ Tim Ingold: Part II: Dwelling. In The Perception of the Environment: – Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London/New York: Routledge. 2002, pp. 153–242.
→ Andrea Olsen: Body and Earth. Seven Web-Based Somatic Excursions. body-earth.org.
→ Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay: Body Space Image – notes towards improvisation and performance. Dorset: Triarchy Press, 1990.

2. Embodied Learning as Decolonial Praxis: Body and Classroom as Contested Sites

Rae Johnson: Embodied Social Justice. New York/London: Routledge, 2017. + Rae Johnson: Embodied Activism – Engaging the Body to Cultivate Liberation, Justice, and Authentic Connection. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2023.

Rae Johnson’s books position the body as a critical site where power, privilege, and resistance are experienced and negotiated. Johnson offers a foundational theoretical and practical framework for understanding how bodies are shaped by human-made systems, affirming sensory experience, movement, and relational awareness as forms of knowledge. The books have been invaluable in bridging critical theory and somatic practice by legitimizing bodily and situated knowledge within pedagogy. They make clear how learning spaces are shaped through bodily experience and how pedagogical approaches might make space for including diverse experiential knowledge. Johnson’s work affirms the body not only as a site of experience but also as a tool for social transformation, informing participatory formats that connect critical reflection with embodied engagement. – Micaela Terk and Vivien Tauchmann

Exercise IV: Engaging the More-Than-Human-Others
Choose an element of the more-than-human world that you engage with in your everyday life. It can be as simple and humble as the water you drink. Notice all the sensory qualities and dimensions of this element – its shape, color, sound, texture. Notice how it moves, or what moves it. Pay attention to how your body responds as you engage with its body (try thinking of inanimate forms as also having bodies; clouds have bodies, lakes have bodies, flowers have bodies, and so on). Then allow yourself to consider how you would feel in your body if this more-than-human other was not in your life, or if its body were weakened, compromised, or injured (perhaps this is already the case). Reflect on the network of relationships and connections this element has with other aspects of the natural world. How are these beings threatened or dominated by humans? How are they resisting or adapting to the threats they face? How does this knowledge land in your body? What can you do to support their liberation and freedom from ongoing threat and harm?
In the case where an element feels more powerful than you are, how do you feel in your body in response to that power?

From: Rae Johnson, Embodied Activism: Engaging the Body to cultivate Liberation, Justice, and authentic Connection. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2023. Edited by Vivien Tauchmann.

Sara Ahmed: Queer phenomenology – Orientations, objects, others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

The series of essays questions the assumed neutrality of bodies in social spaces, challenging the linear stability of how many of us engage with other bodies, or inhabit our own bodies. In my own research and teaching, I examine how bodies show up in designed spatial narrative experiences (museums, installations, exhibitions). Bodies are display structures, or representations of collective bodies. Bodies wander the space (audiences) around objects, architecture, or other bodies, in contact with material and medial interventions. Yet often the design discipline considers bodies, and the embodied experience, as impartial and universal. Ahmed’s input pushes against this desire for stability – a good place to start designing. – Emily Smith

See also:
→ Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein: Data Feminism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020.
→ Sheila Batacharya and Yuk-Lin Renita Wong (eds.), Sharing Breath: Embodied Learning and Decolonization. Athabasca: AU Press, 2018.

3. Labor Choreographies & Disembodied Productivity: Feeling Our Work

Karen Brodine: Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking. Seattle: Red Letter Press, 1990.

Karen Brodine was a typesetter, a poet, a union activist, a dancer, a friend, a lover. In 1987, she died from breast cancer, barely 40 years old. In 1990 her book of poems, »Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking« was published posthumously. The book is designed by Helen Gilbert, with editorial/technical assistance by Clara Fraser, Mike Warner, Tamara Turner, Raya Fidel and Gaby Garza. It’s typeset in Korinna and Benguiat by Imageset in Mercer Island, Washington. All these all these hands, working, moving, thinking – labor performed to put a book into the world. The poem from which the book’s title is drawn is one that I return to in every moment of teaching – and in every moment of working at my computer. Karen Brodine describes, with a wildly intimate sensitivity, what it feels like to have a body, to be a body, alongside and in collaboration with machines and digital, abstract spaces. In her writing, my disembodied designer self finds solace and recognition; I am not alone, other bodies also ache. We are together in this dysphoric relationship to machine bodies and to our own bodies. – Sara Kaaman

Exercise V: Interfacial Bodies

Requires at least 4 participants

1) Write down all the digital design gestures that you perform on a daily basis, individually on small pieces of paper.

2) Fold them and place them in a hat or a jar.

3) Pair up with a friend and pick one word from the hat. Find a way to physically perform the word for the rest of the group, together. Keep performing until the audience can guess what you are trying to embody.

By translating interfacial gestures and movements like »align left« or »force quit« or »undo« into embodied re-enactments, you’ll be confronted with the ways your design labor and thinking is compressed into invisible and overlooked micro-movements. This game invites defamiliarization through play, and reveals how your digital tools shape not only your workflow but also your perception and your imagination.

Practice developed by Sara Kaaman after Karen Brodine.

If you would like to read more on body-based approaches to design education check out the bibliography where you can find more resources, such as student testimonials gathered by Nicole Schumann-Sizaret from her 2024 Feldenkrais workshop, Sitting – Me and My Chair.

ongoing Open Call

We invite contributions from you; design educators, students, alumni, researchers, pedagoges, enthusiasts and others to submit and share the sources which are reference points and/or inspiration to your practice! Your contribution will be published in our infrequent newsletter and in our text-based bibliography.

→ Find out how to contribute here.

Info

Teaching Design started as a collectively gathered bibliography focusing on design education from intersectional feminist and decolonial perspectives. Since its launch in September 2019, it has expanded into conversational formats, workshops, a temporary library and a space for reflections, which all has led to the platform in its current form. 

Currently the bibliography as well as this newsletter is curated and edited by Lisa Baumgarten unless mentioned otherwise.