This year’s theme in the codesign program is body dialogues. In design in general and in codesign in particular we are too often assuming that the body is unproblematically with us in what we are doing whatever we are the designers or those we collaborate with. But bodies participate in and transform our encounters as we experience and make sense of the worlds we live in. We age and learn through our bodies as we also become lifted or depressed when our embodied interaction with things and people around us exceeds what we imagine. We are at once both mind and body as we most freely improvise our everyday practices, but are we prepared to acknowledge this intimate connectedness as we engage in codesign and coproduction? And do we have the means to think and act through body dialogues also when the body comes to the foreground through posing questions to our physical capacity or well-being.
As a first inquiry into the theme of body dialogues, students at the codesign master program have collaborated with people who in one way or another have these body dialogues more present than others. The result is number of small video portraits:
Christian and Marianne let us look into their life together after Marianne has been struck by Alzheimers (https://vimeo.com/142066720)
Jutta and Jens urge us to be willing to talk about everyday difficulties without loosing our sense of self also when Alzheimers makes life very different (https://vimeo.com/142066837)
And a dance class of Alzheimers affected show us how much dancing can still be enjoyed (https://vimeo.com/141874093)
Collaborating with three people suffering from chronic pain another group of students ask: ’If pain had a face what would it look like?’ (https://vimeo.com/143189245)
Also many rithalin users struggle with coming to terms with a life that without medication may be to hard to bear. Together with Sandy a last group of students worked with this issue in a portrait of an everyday in the shadows of a ADHD diagnosis (https://youtu.be/Goo3hzMUnlY)
In the coming months’ the codesign class are involved in new collaborations that will further feed into the theme of body dialogues. In the spring this will eventually lead to a book, that hopefully will push the boundaries of codesign practices.
