Conference Agenda

Design landscapes are undergoing a profound transformation, exploring new pathways that embrace new kinds of materialities (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Murphy, et al., 2021; Tilman, 2015), led by alternative epistemologies that embrace post-phenomenological worldviews, such as more-than-human design (Giaccardi, et al., 2025). The rise of complex tailoring in applied design contexts, such as bespoke design (Farrugia, et al., 2023; Campbell, et al., 2003), orpersonalized prosthetics (Whatley, et al., 2023; Zhou, et al., 2023) creates an increasing potential to design for ultra-personalized solutions (Hasani et al., 2025; Ozdemir, et al., 2022), that can attune to post-phenomenological (Merleau-Ponty, 1968), and radical phenomenological (Seyler, 2013; Henry, 2012) understandings of sensitive and intimate qualities of lived body experiences. However, integrative approaches towards understanding lived body experiences through the lens of disability (Siebers, 2013; Mairs, 1986), that are provide a radical rethinking of bodily norms (Kuppers, 2022; 2013) are still under-explored in the context of design, human-computer interaction, robotics (Alonzo and Hassan, 2025; Xu, et al., 2025; Correia de Barros, 2022), or assistive technologies. The domain of Dance has a vast knowledge on choreography, movement practice, dance analysis, but also somatic work (Whatley, 2014; Block, 2021; Hanna, 1995; Eddy, 2009; Imus, 2020; Imus and Young, 2023; 

Joyce, 2023). Hybrid practices at the intersection of disability, dance and/or design (Fdili Alaoui, 2023; De Blanc, 2024; Loke and Robertson, 2010; Ferri and Leahy, 2025) can invite the potential to attend to the hidden layers of bodily experience during dance work, exploring the thresholds between knowledge domains. In our workshop, we shift the conversation from headspace to body-space, cultivating integrative approaches of collaborative design-making. We use the epistemological strategy for embodied knowing (Barbour, 2001) (Figure 1) as a reference framework, which integrates four knowledge paths: a path for scientific inquiry, for artistic inquiry, for the process of creation, and five epistemological positions (silence-received -subjective -procedural -constructed) (Belenky, et al, 1996). These knowledge paths converge at the centre, wherein action, performance, and illumination engage in ‘moving-with’ and ‘making-with’ practices through which interdisciplinary design teams can scaffold experiential, affective, and relational qualities of bodily mattering (Barad, 2007). We employ dance work to advance the knowledge base of ‘embodied knowing’ in Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Robotics, and Assistive Technologies.