Embodied Experience: Design as Practice for Unveiling the Sensible

Abstract

This investigation, through the lens and disciplinary practice of design in dialogue with other fields of knowledge, interrogates the contemporary reality of the disciplined and objectified body in relational action. As a counterpoint, it proposes a series of episodes that grant access to the sensible body, weaving together theoretical reflection, critique, and experimental material interventions. Here, design operates as a practice of reflexive mediation to reposition corporeality as a primordial territory to reclaim in a global society increasingly defined by the virtualization of relationships and the intensification of the body-machine project. This research project concentrates its practical contribution through four essays mediated by experiences composed of objects, space, and sound. These interventions function as proposals that destabilize interaction norms, thereby reactivating, if only episodically, the body’s sensible front. The results of these experiences emerge as revelations affirming materiality’s potential to create epistemic spaces in the social automatisms of the body, exposing symptoms of estrangement and vulnerability while also proposing a re-signification of encounter and touch. These fissures underpin the public session model applied in the practical experiments, which are configured as moments of decontextualization from daily life to redesign participants’ bodily experience. In this research, design consolidates itself as a practice of provocation for revelation, making conscious the possibility of transformation and a renewed relationship with the body and the gestures that arise from it, particularly its relational action.

Date of Award	31 Oct 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Supervisor	Gerard Vilar Roca (Director)