VIRTUAL: Applying Education

Abstract

The dominant model of the mechanistic body has obscured and devalued experiential ways of knowing, and intuitive ways of being in, and with, our bodies. Within the healthcare system, agency of body, and authenticity of experience are curtailed by the ways in which the emotional, and the sensory body, are separated, in value and in language, from the physical, and quantifiable body. Evidence of this is also seen in the ways in which normal processes of the body, such as pregnancy, are often overly pathologized and medicalized. As a result, women and families are denied access to an equitable, respectful, or enriching experience of this life event. Across two studios, third-year students of Industrial design look at the body as the site for open inquiry, and questioning. The first studio examines the body through the lenses of phenomenology, culture, emotion, and symbiosis. Using a range of interdisciplinary tools, students work in groups to map each of these aspects, as an exercise in information and cartography. These maps act as devices to enable and encourage a different way of knowing the body and inviting a conversation with the dominant healthcare discourse. In the second studio, students explore the complexities of pregnancy through a physical, emotional, political, and cultural lens. They use storytelling, journey mapping, representative model-making, and problem-solving to navigate and clarify their way through the studio. Each student develops a unique design trajectory through a discovery process of personal affiliation, and truth-finding, to create pathways, values, and narratives that deeply resonate within themselves. Pedagogically, this also enables the designer to recognize the embodied nature of practice within themselves, in conjunction with the abstracted, other body that is the subject of their inquiry. Through this, the practice of design itself is seen and understood as a function of the physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual body.