My Vision

I hope to continue exploring how design can deepen people's awareness of their bodies and everyday lived experiences. Although I began my design journey believing that design was primarily about solving problems, my perspective gradually shifted as I encountered people struggling to express their bodily experiences. Yet these invisible experiences often shape everyday decisions and behaviours. This led me to realise that, in many situations, supporting understanding can be more valuable than providing solutions.

I believe good design does not succeed by telling people what is wrong with their body or behaviour, but by giving them a visual language through which they can interpret their own bodily experience. In my final master project, after participants saw the printed pressure map of their own sitting posture, I asked an open question — "can you connect this image to your daily habits or events?" — without suggesting what the connection might be. Several participants arrived at very different, personal explanations: one traced the asymmetry to a habitual standing posture, another linked it to an old injury they had since recovered from but still unconsciously avoided loading. I never told them their pressure distribution was "wrong" or diagnosed a specific cause — the question opened a space for reflection, but the specific meaning was entirely theirs to construct, drawing on memories and habits I could never have accessed as a designer. This is the moment I understood the difference between designing a solution and designing a condition for interpretation: the first assumes the designer knows the correct answer, the second trusts the participant to construct their own, even when prompted to look.

This connection between theory and practice first became visible to me during the Human-Goose project. Applying mental model theory there pushed me to look past what participants said they wanted and toward the assumptions, memories, and emotional associations underlying their behaviour — patterns that a more surface-level interview would have missed entirely. It was around this same project that soma design gave me a name for a shift I was already feeling: instead of arriving with a problem to solve, I began designing situations that let people discover and articulate their own questions.

Looking across my master's projects, I recognised this as a recurring pattern, which has shaped my vision of becoming a designer who creates conditions for reflection rather than simply solving problems. I believe designers should not always provide answers, but instead facilitate people's understanding of their own experiences.

In the future, I want to further develop methods and interactive artefacts that help people externalise tacit bodily experiences and support reflection through interaction. Rather than using technology to prescribe behaviour or provide answers, I am interested in how technology can invite curiosity, interpretation, and personal meaning-making.

I see embodiment and somatic design as an important direction for the future of interaction design. I am particularly interested in using mental models to better understand how people perceive and make sense of their bodily experiences, and in designing interactions that externalise these internal experiences, making them tangible and discussable. As digital technologies increasingly mediate everyday life, I believe there is growing value in designing interactions that reconnect people with their bodies instead of drawing attention away from them. I hope this approach can also encourage richer conversations around bodily experiences and provide designers with deeper insights that are often difficult to obtain through conventional research methods.

My ambition is to contribute to the field of embodiment by developing new methods, tools, and interactive experiences that enrich both design research and everyday bodily awareness.