Abstract
There is an urgent need in design education to consider the ways we are supporting our students to develop body-literacy. Our current technological moment has the potential to increasingly alienate us from the experience of understanding our bodies and the ways our physicality and forms intersect with our understanding of ourselves and others. The implications of this alienation from the body has outsized impacts on design students, their development as designers and the resultant design products that will populate our world in the future. The work presented here developed out of a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) which convened in Fall 2023 at Pratt Institute of Art and Design in order to initiate a transdisciplinary discourse on the body. In this paper, we share the results of a transdisciplinary discourse leading to the proposal that all design disciplines integrate bodies-thinking as an educational methodology meant to question, challenge and reframe pedagogy to teach through and with the body. By drawing connections to the body, students are able to both learn about their own bodies and the bodies of others and build personal, embodied relationships with diverse disciplines, enhancing motivation and information retention, and resulting in the production of informed and empathic designs on, for and of bodies.
Presenters
Ashley BalesFaculty, Math and Science, Pratt Institute, New York, United States Chelsea Limbird
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Interior Design, Interdisciplinary Studies, Pratt Institute, Rhode Island, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
EMBODIMENT, INCLUSIVE DESIGN, EMPATHIC DESIGN, TRANSDISCIPLINARY, FLC, PEDAGOGY, LEARNING OUTCOMES
