This draft ofers a preliminary suggestion for Phenomenological Research through Design (PRtD), a methodological framework that integrates phenomenological principles into Research through Design (RtD) practice. Based on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, the framework outlines five interrelated methodological aspects: #1 Prototyping through the Lived Body, #2 Exploring the Reciprocity of Touch and Touchback, #3 Cultivating Social Interrelation, #4 Embracing Drifting as a Method, and #5 Attuning to Intercorporeality - as tools for engaging with and reflecting on design processes that are bodily, social and material. PRtD ofers a grounded, yet flexible approach to designing with and through the body. The framework is proposed as a practical contribution to Soma Design, embodied interaction design, and reflective methodologies in HCI, particularly for those seeking to centre lived experience in interaction design.
In Research through Design (RtD), the act of making ofers a space for generating knowledge through
material exploration and reflection [
This paper outlines a possible direction for Phenomenological Research through Design (PRtD), a
methodological framework that ofers an alternative lens for generating design knowledge grounded in
ifrst-person experience, bodily attunement, and relational awareness. PRtD responds to recent calls
within HCI to adopt more entangled, situated, and reflective approaches that acknowledge the complexity
of human–technology relations [
I will begin with a detour to an example from my design practice with embodied interactive installations.
Dream Forest was an installation created by the art collective illutron in 2016 for a week-long music festival
in the woods. Our intention was to ofer a dream-like walking experience away from the noise of the festival.
Participants entered through a hole in the fence, received a headset, and suddenly, the festival sounds
disappeared. Breathing slowed as ambient music filled their ears. They followed a path of illuminated
trees, meeting others walking in the same quiet rhythm. The light patterns shifted gently as they passed
by, responding to each movement with ripples of color and soft pulses of glow. At the heart of the forest,
a clearing revealed aerial dancers (see figure 1), their breath visible like smoke in the heavy white light.
From there, the walk continued until participants returned the headsets and stepped back into the festival,
carrying the experience of the passage with them. When we work on installations in the woods, my lived
body is always part of the process. Borrowing Susan Kozel’s words: “I touch the world when I handle
materials in the creative process, and these materials touch me back. . . ” [
PRtD distils five interrelated methodological aspects: #1 Prototyping through the Lived Body, #2 Exploring the Reciprocity of Touch and Touchback, #3 Cultivating Social Interrelation, #4 Embracing Drifting as Method, and #5 Attuning to Intercorporeality. Each aspect ofers both a conceptual entry point for engaging with the bodily and relational entanglements of design processes.
While design practice ofers an array of methods, such as sketching, personas, and prototyping,
many approaches continue to overlook embodied, sensorial knowledge as a legitimate and generative
epistemic source. However, in domains such as Soma Design [
PRtD builds on this trajectory by placing lived, felt experience at the centre of inquiry. Rather than treating the body as an object of study, this framework conceives it as the lived body – the pre-reflective ground of perception and action, the very site where experience and meaning emerge. It is through this embodied subjectivity that design thinking and reflection-in-action take shape. The five aspects help frame the methodological contribution as follows. #1 Prototyping through the Lived Body; emphasises the body as an active material and sensing apparatus: through gestural sketching, physical enactment, or sensor tuning, designers use their bodily presence to probe interactions. #2 Exploring the Reciprocity of Touch and Touchback; highlights the dialogical nature of material engagement: touching always entails being touched back, as materials subtly resist, shape, or redirect the designer’s intentions. #3 Cultivating Social Interrelation: attends to the afective and embodied dynamics between people in collaborative or co-design settings, where meaning emerges through mutual bodily responsiveness. #4 Embracing Drifting as a Method: re-frames deviation, uncertainty, and exploratory movement not as errors but as essential to bodily designs’ emergent, temporal and iterative character. #5 Attuning to Intercorporeality: recognises the entangled, shared nature of embodied experience: even solitary design actions are informed by prior and ongoing relations with other human and more-than-human bodies.
Rather than ofering a prescriptive toolkit, PRtD serves as a reflective and generative scafold for those navigating the complexities of embodied interaction design. By foregrounding lived experience and relational materiality, this suggestive framework contributes to ongoing discussions within the HCI community, particularly those interested in somatic design, qualitative and practice-based methodologies, and more-than-human perspectives.
Research through Design (RtD) has become an established approach in HCI for generating knowledge
through making, emphasising reflection on the outcomes of design processes [
Soma Design, particularly developed by Höök [
Other phenomenological approaches in HCI provide essential context. Work by Kozel [
The framework also responds to recent developments in HCI, often referred to as the fourth wave
[
The PRtD methodology contributes a synthesised, phenomenologically grounded perspective for RtD. It draws from and integrates existing methods, adding a philosophical foundation and an emphasis on lived, bodily experience. PRtD is not meant to replace Soma Design or other significant work that builds on phenomenology, but to complement and extend it. By situating it explicitly within phenomenology merged with Research through Design. The intention is to frame embodied practices as methodological lenses that generate knowledge, not just experiential outcomes, and to expand from the designer’s own body to social, material, and more-than-human entanglements, aligned with current discussions in HCI on relational and situated methodologies. So the distinction is not competitive but complementary: PRtD can be seen as a phenomenologically grounded evolution of soma-inspired practice in RtD.
This section introduces the five methodological aspects of Phenomenological Research through Design (PRtD), each rooted in phenomenological thinking and shaped through practice. While they are interrelated and often overlap in action, articulating them individually ofers a clearer foundation for reflective application. Together, these five aspects frame a method of working that is somatically attuned, materially dialogical, socially responsive, emergent, and fundamentally intersubjective. They are ofered not as rigid steps but as reflective lenses that guide attention to the embodied, relational, and processual dimensions often overlooked in Research through Design.
This aspect emphasises the role of the designer’s own body as a tool of inquiry. Drawing from
MerleauPonty’s [
Designing is never a one-way act. This aspect foregrounds the dynamic, dialogical relationship between
the body and material, which Merleau-Ponty [
Design rarely unfolds in isolation. This aspect foregrounds the role of embodied social dynamics – gesture, rhythm, proximity, and shared presence – in shaping collaborative design processes. Grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intersubjectivity [40], it explores how mutual understanding and meaning emerge through interactions between embodied subjects. Movement becomes a form of communication: a gesture prompts a response; a group posture or rhythm shift signals a collective reframing of ideas. These relational dynamics extend beyond present collaborators to include imagined users, often accessed through role-play or situated enactments [41]. Attending to such intersubjective exchanges helps designers become more attuned to the afective, social, and communicative dimensions of co-use and shared spaces. This aligns with enactive approaches to intersubjectivity, which view meaning as arising through participatory sense-making, where bodies co-regulate and co-create understanding through interaction [34].
Drifting articulates a productive openness to change – conceptually, emotionally, and bodily – during the design process. Rather than deviating from the plan, drifting is treated as an emergent responsiveness mode. Designers may shift direction based on an unanticipated material behaviour, a moment of emotional resonance, or the intuitive sense that “something is of.” As Krogh et al.[ 36] argue, such shifts are not failures but invitations. On a micro level, drifting occurs when flow leads to surprising forms or meanings. Documenting these embodied detours helps surface experiential knowledge that resists linear explanation [21, 39]. Drifting connect to intercorporeality – for intance in collaborative contexts – when our states shift together. It relates to reversibility and hyper-reflection, as we move between thought and action, afecting materials and being afected by them. Schiphorst et al’s [ 42] evaluative dimension of the body points to how we attune to internal and external states through embodied awareness. This resonates with drifting as a gradual, felt reorientation in response to shifting interactions and environments. Hence drifting is a way of attuning: of staying open to change and letting embodied awareness guide how the design unfolds as part of design’s emergent and temporal nature.
This final aspect grounds all others by high-lighting the intercorporeal nature of experience:
MerleauPonty’s [
I prototype through my lived body throughout the design process: when I test a sensor or a system in the woods, I notice how I lean, reach, or shift weight against uneven ground. My body is not only measuring outcomes – it is the medium through which design unfolds. When I handle materials, they respond: fabric stretches damp in the night air, a gesture meets resistance from tangled cables, the solder spreads too quickly, a wire refuses to bend, rain soaks the sensors – each instance revealing the reciprocity of touch and touchback. When I work in collaborations, the entwining of thinking and doing is never mine alone. In the lab we work side by side in silence, tuned to one another’s tempo and mood; in the forest, that social interrelation expands to include the rhythms of the site—the sway of trees, the shifting light, the chill of wet air. Drifting happens as bodily states shift: hours of soldering by lamplight, or carrying equipment along muddy paths, bring fatigue and altered focus; breath and posture adjust, guiding how we continue. And always there is intercorporeality: designing is never solitary but entangled in a shared bodily field – shaped by my collaborators’ rhythms, by imagined participants who will walk the path, by the textures of the forest, by sensors that fail under rain, and by past bodily habits carried into the space.
Phenomenological Research through Design (PRtD) ofers an alternative lens for generating design knowledge, one grounded in first-person experience [ 48, 49, 50], bodily attunement, and relational awareness. Rather than abstracting design knowledge from external observation or generalised models, PRtD centres the lived, embodied perspective of the designer as a site of inquiry.
The core future contribution of PRtD lies in ofering a methodology for designers to engage with embodied and social experience as legitimate sources of insight. Concepts like drifting, intercorporeality, and touchback give language to phenomena often felt but hard to articulate [46]. These aspects function as reflective prompts within the design process, inviting designers to attend to movement, tension, rhythm, and resonance in ways that surface experiential knowledge. In design education, these aspects might encourage students to prototype through their lived body, enact gestures, or document bodily responses in a design journal [51]. They may track moments of drift – when plans shift direction through felt insight or material surprises – and reflect on how these shifts informed their designs. PRtD thus helps legitimise inquiry modes often dismissed as too subjective, even though they are central to creative practice. Furthermore, the five aspects can be understood not only from a development perspective but also from a user experience perspective. In this way, they also serve as a framework for reflecting on the user’s bodily experience (see Table 1).
Evaluating a methodology rooted in subjective and embodied experience presents well-known challenges
[52, 53]. Further unfolding of this methodology should include practical guidance, examples in practice,
and validation of the approach. Validation should be established through thick description of examples,
reflective resonance, and transferability. The value of PRtD lies not in predictive outcomes but in its
ability to illuminate otherwise overlooked dynamics. Its contribution is generative, not to replace other
methods, but to enrich them by surfacing layers of knowing. Future work might include comparative
or longitudinal studies, but the primary aim is to open new methodological ground [
PRtD is inherently time- and attention-intensive. It requires slowness, sensory awareness, and willingness to reflect, capacities not always supported in high-speed, output-driven settings. Moreover, not all designers can or want to engage somatically. Cultural norms, physical constraints, or psychological preferences may shape access to embodied modes.
As Virtual Reality (VR), wearables, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shape embodied experience, phenomenological methods become more relevant. Designing for VR, for instance, demands attention to how balance, motion, and immersion feel in the body; a phenomenon Kozel et al. [54] describe as the "weird giggle," capturing the embodied dissonance and delight when expectations misalign with perceptual experience. PRtD might ofer a vocabulary and structure to support such design sensitivity. In AI and ML, where systems behave semi-autonomously, the idea of touchback extends: the machine becomes a participant in shaping user perception and social interaction. Ranten et al. [55] suggest embracing the inherent algorithmic fuzziness in ML to support embodied experience.
Post-phenomenology also addresses interplay with technology, examining how technologies mediate human perception and action. Post-phenomenology foregrounds the relational co-constitution of humans and technological artefacts [23], which resonates with the design sensitivities proposed in PRtD.
Soma Design is constantly growing into a larger program within HCI, making a vital contribution by showing how somatic practices can heighten bodily awareness and enrich design. This proposal for Phenomenological Research through Design (PRtD) is intended as complementary to this program rather than oppositional. Framing this line of work explicitly in phenomenological terms can potentially provide additional conceptual and methodological clarity. Anchoring soma-inspired practices in phenomenology (e.g., Merleau-Ponty’s notions of the lived body, reversibility, intersubjectivity, intercorporeality, and drift) ofers a philosophical foundation that deepens the conceptual vocabulary available to designers. Moreover, PRtD extends this perspective toward relational and more-than-human ifelds of entanglement, situating the body within social, material, and ecological contexts. This shift also highlights the epistemological dimension: as a Research through Design methodology, PRtD foregrounds not only the experiential richness of soma-inspired practices but also potentially explores the kinds of knowledge they generate.
To fully unfold these initial thoughts into a methodology, I need to move beyond philosophical grounding and conceptual vocabulary toward clarifying procedures and demonstrating how specific methods contribute to its epistemic aims. What I ofer here is not a finished framework but an evolving vocabulary – an invitation to dialogue. My hope is that it supports others in articulating what is often sensed yet dificult to name: the ways bodies, materials, and relations give rise to design knowledge. I will leave you with a question that continues to guide my own work: How do we articulate what is often sensed but hard to describe? New forms and methods will inevitably emerge, and perhaps that is precisely both the challenge and the opportunity – to keep exploring how collaborative embodied experience can be shared, taught, and built upon.
Phenomenological Research through Design (PRtD) ofers an initial suggestion towards an emerging methodology for engaging embodied, first-person, and relational experience in the making of interactive systems. The five aspects – #1 Prototyping through the Lived Body, #2 Exploring the Reciprocity of Touch and Touchback, #3 Cultivating Social Interrelation, #4 Embracing Drifting as Method, and #5 Attuning to Intercorporeality – emerged through engagement in design practice. Together, they encourage a design perspective in which the body becomes the site of inquiry, materials act as co-participants, and the distinction between making and experiencing is deliberately blurred.
The framework contributes to Interaction Design and HCI by translating Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concepts into possible actionable, practice-based guidance within a Research through Design paradigm. In doing so, it foregrounds not only the experiential richness of soma-inspired practices but also the kinds of knowledge they can generate. In this way, PRtD seeks to bridge practice and research, providing reflective lenses that make embodied and somatic approaches more legible within HCI discourses on rigour, validity, and methodological contribution.
Rather than ofering a prescriptive toolkit, PRtD articulates a set of attentional shifts and possible working modes. It remains a first step – requiring further maturing, experimentation, and reflection. A natural next step would be to unfold these initial thoughts into a more fully articulated methodology: moving beyond a philosophical grounding and conceptual vocabulary towards clarifying procedural structures and specifying how particular methods can contribute to its epistemic purpose.
For now, PRtD serves as an open invitation to methodological dialogue within the HCI community, particularly for those exploring somatic, experiential, or more-than-human approaches. It is not presented as a conclusive methodology, but as a generative one – an emergent vocabulary for thinking and designing with and through the lived body. When the body is not merely considered but felt and consulted, when materials are listened to and responded to, and when social relations are designed with rather than around, interactive systems can become more responsive, intimate, and alive.
Dream Forest is created by the collaborative art collective illutron, https://www.illutron.dk/projects/ 2016-dream-forest.
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