Designing, Making, and the Body Intuitive

Abstract

Embodied thinking, also termed ‘corporeal intuition,’ is the ability of the body to hold knowledge, be creative, and be active participants in the making process. This model challenges the idea that to make is to translate something that exists only in the mind into something that exists tangibly outside of the human body. Rather, the experience of making is an integral relationship between mind and body, the body and object of work, and the hand and material. Through a series of ceramic and woodworking exercises, each with increasing scales and complexities, this research explores experiences of making to understand how the material is an active part of the thinking and making process and then speculates how this process relates to architectural education. Research methodology tracks each exercise’s steps from beginning to end, and then rigorously analyzes the roles that each material’s properties play in the process. Thinking through making raises architecture students’ awareness of all the forces that are part of a design project from concept through to final built work, and the final phase of this research looks at how specific exercises (derived from this project’s methodology) foster embodied thinking for a more holistic design process.