Designing for Embodied Being-in-the-World

Abstract

How may we design coherent, physical-digital hybrid artifacts as meaningful, mediating elements in a persons' embodied "Being-in-the-World" We explore this question through two cases, one of designing for a person with autism spectrum disorder and one for people with dementia. We reflected in an iterative way on how the designs evolved, and on how our theoretical lens, grounded in embodied theory, helped to shape the designs. In the final round of reflection, we compared both case studies, looking for overall commonalities, which formed the basis for the resulting design framework that we introduce in this paper. The framework consists of seven principles, of which three support embodied activity in the here-and-now, three support developmental processes over a longer time-scale, and finally the idea of a reflective process to connect them.