Regarding the Pain of Others, or, An Other Self?
About the Body as Interconnecting Materiality to Reveal, Confront and Subvert Conditions of Power and Injustice
2025, essay
Abstract:
Within globalised capitalism, designers have played a significant part in the design of capitalism’s discriminative and inhumane mechanisms and their consequences on others (human and more-than-human.) When we buy , for example, a piece of clothing, we do not get to know about its journey, the hands that shaped it, or the environmental impact its production has caused. In this sense, design has played a crucial role in the decline of relational capabilities. This essay proposes somatic practices in design education as a crucial tool for critical reflection and accountability of the harm, created by design. Taking the practice-based research project “Self-As-Other-Trainings” as a point of departure, the text will discuss how body-centred work serves to understand, in a nuanced and experiential way, the systemic complexities designers are embedded in. It will do so by employing kinaesthetic empathy: an embodied analytical approach in which both the researcher’s body and bodies of the participants are the research tools. It will illustrate how such an approach does not only question the status quo of global capitalism, but asks how embodied pedagogies can shape the sense of collective responsibility as pre-condition for creating holistic socio-ecological transformation.
The book is available here.
eds.:Mustapha Moussaoui, Kris Krois & Teresa Palmieri.
Oekom Verlag, 2025.
