Bodystorming as embodied designing

environment where the product will be employed results in a better user interface. You will be exposed to real-world situations such as loud environments, the rush crowd, work-role conflicts, all of which impact design decisions. A second bodystorming methodology is what we call “strong prototyping” in the space or place in which the product or service will be used. Let’s say you have been hired to build a new handheld device for use on submarines. You should construct and model the hallways, spaces, and structures (out of cardboard perhaps) to simulate a submarine environment. The idea is to test your handheld in the “replicated” environment. Perhaps it doesn’t have all the properties of the actual field setting, but it should consider the more important aspects. Then you can change constraints such as lighting, or how easy it is to walk through differently sized doorways/passageways while trying to use the handheld. The third methodological variant and most popular form An emerging design practice developed by natural extension of the mode of participatory design known as “bodystorming” is often considered a form of prototyping in context, and is enacted instead as a technology directly supporting collaborative embodied cognition. This “art form” of bodystorming, which departs radically from ideational methods, is referred to as “embodied storming” to distinguish it from other forms called bodystorming that are already contested and because it is supported by theories of embodied cognition. Our emphasis on immediacy and tacit experience breaks with the ideational and theatrical modes of acting out technology scenarios. Embodied storming posits that we ought to first create the experience of physical performance, not to ideate but to enact experiential awareness. This orientation postpones the particulars of designed forms, functions, and even ideas. We believe that “premature ideation” exposes participants to the problems of groupthink, the fixation bias known as following Klein’s “garden path” of sense-making [1]. The goal of embodied storming is not just the instrumental formulation of better experience ideas in the context of their use, but we also aim to enact a tangible understanding of the entanglements and actions of human activity in possible future situations. We have found this generative, enacted mode of participant observation creates the conditions for the collective expression of working out problems, of sense-making situations and unmaking them, by performing actions in simulated settings and occasions in real time.