Evidencing embodied participatory design

This paper presents an exploratory, collaborative project and the visualisation method developed to communicate the fragmented but embodied experiences of the three participating designers. It introduces the Electric Corset and Other Future Histories project, and reflects on the artefacts that enabled diverse practices to be shared between the designers, and the emergence of a layered, expressive visual narrative as both a work in its own right, and as a tool for communication. It finishes with a discussion of the issues in communicating experience in a participatory design research project with mental health service users, and how learning from the Electric Corset visualisation has helped us evidence individual experience where the usual AV capture techniques are not appropriate.