9.1 Bodies in Design: Rethinking Norms, Materials, Technologies, and Methods

Corresponding Chairs

Gozde Goncu Berk, University of California, Davis

Sarah Kettley, The University of Edinburgh

Co-Chairs

Elif Ozden-Yenigun, Royal College of Art

Theo Hughes-Riley, Nottingham Trent University

Abstract

Design has always engaged with the human body, from shaping objects around physical needs to addressing care, identity, and lived experience. Yet bodies are not one size fits all; they are diverse, expressive, shifting, and resistant to standard definitions. Disabled, racialized, gender nonconforming, and other nonnormative bodies challenge and expand design. With the rise of wearables, interactive garments, soft robotics, and responsive materials, designers now engage the body in active, intimate, and complex ways. Design becomes about how people inhabit and care for their bodies, and how those bodies are read, touched, and understood through material and technological systems.

This track invites investigations into the body in contemporary design, not as a fixed norm but as a dynamic, politicized site of experience and becoming. We encourage reflections on embodied expertise attentive to identity, care, and interdependence. In particular, we highlight critical materiality, how the textures, properties, and politics of materials shape outcomes, and wearables and soft systems as key sites where body and material co-construct experience. Rather than treating bodily differences as deviations, we seek work that centers diverse bodies across race, gender, disability, age, size, and mobility, and examines how material body interactions shape well-being, perception, and inclusion.

We invite submissions that:

• Explore embodied and soma-focused design methods that cultivate bodily knowledge and co-creation.

• Investigate how soft systems, interactive textiles, and responsive materials shape bodily perception, movement, and care.

• Center diverse bodies across race, gender, disability, age, size, and mobility as foundational to design.

• Examine critical materiality, including how textures, responsiveness, and politics of materials co-construct bodily experience.

• Analyze how sensing systems and material interfaces mediate how bodies are read, touched, or made visible.

• Reflect on care, interdependence, and lived bodily experience in material–body interactions.

• Consider the influence of cultural, social, and political systems on design practices with marginalized bodies.

Keywords

Embodied Design, Wearables and Soft Systems, Material-Body Interaction, Critical Materiality, Bodily Diversity

References

Höök, K. (2018). Designing with the body: Somaesthetic interaction design. MIT Press.

Wiberg, M. (2018). The materiality of interaction: Notes on the materials of interaction design. MIT Press.

Cranny-Francis, A. (2013). Technology and touch: The biopolitics of emerging technologies. Palgrave Macmillan.

Hokka, J. (2023). Gender and the diversity of the human body as challenges for the inclusive design of wearable technology. Fashion Practice, 16(1), 108–133.

Riggs, A. T., Janicki, S., Moesgen, T., Howell, N., & Cochrane, K. A. (2025, July). Queer/Crip body mapping: Expressing dynamic bodily experiences with data. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’25) (pp. 2884–2900). ACM