The "Embodied approach" in design: the way to the East

Filonenko Nadezhda Sergeevna ORCID: 0000-0003-1459-9272 PhD in Art History Associate Professor, Department of Graphic Design, Ural State University of Architecture and Art named for N. S. Alferov Karl Liebknecht str., 23, Sverdlovsk region, Yekaterinburg, 620075, Russia philonenkonadezhda@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Throughout the twentieth century. The "science" of design sought to rely on data from various sciences – sociology, psychology, ergonomics, etc. It is not surprising that the modern "science" of design is increasingly influenced by concepts that have come, for example, from cognitive science, which explores human consciousness and its processes. Today, the so-called bodily approach (Eng. "embodied cognition approach") has the greatest influence, "clearly showing that it is not our brain (as a kind of super–organ) and not our consciousness (spirit), but the body - as a unity of the brain, consciousness, physical and cultural-historical physicality – that produces spontaneous rather than natural changes in the world around us" ^{[1, p. 5]}.

In the "science" of design, the "body approach" is constantly subjected to critical reflection: for example, some researchers accuse it of "not giving specific design guidelines and not forming a list of general design principles" ^[2] or that the full potential of the "body approach" in design lies only in the designer designed "with feeling", as an artist or craftsman does ^{[3, p. 90]}. There is also criticism of only a specific direction of development of the "body approach" in design. Anyway, the theoretical understanding of the "bodily approach" in the Western "science" of design faces certain difficulties.

For us, the situation is complicated by the fact that if, for example, American researchers develop a "bodily approach" based on the tradition of American pragmatism, focusing on the personal experience of a person (J. Dewey, W. James), then in the domestic "science" of design, inheriting the tradition of Neoplatonism (recall the "Organ Projection" of P. A. Florensky), there is not yet a sufficient theoretical and philosophical basis for the introduction of the "bodily approach".

In the framework of this study, we will turn to the experience of design-theoretical reflection of Eastern theorists and design practitioners based on regional philosophy, which has always focused on the human bodily experience and very early developed a categorical apparatus that allows recording the experience gained. And although the Eastern "science" of design is still being formed, we believe that the generalization of the results of the design reflection of Eastern colleagues, as well as an appeal to some fundamental categories of Eastern philosophy today can give impetus to the development of the "theory" of "body-oriented" design in the West.

Accordingly, we are not talking about "turning away from our own historical roots and adopting an Eastern worldview." Rather, we find ourselves in the mainstream of the "oriental movement", the formation of which takes place in the West against the background of the development of an entire industry of oriental practices, which, according to sociologists, indicates the hidden need of society to form an "oriental" tradition in a "Western context" ^[4].

The purpose of the article is to determine the potential of the Eastern tradition in building a theory of "body-oriented" design. Within the framework of the article, we will be interested, first of all, in the concepts necessary for the construction of such a theory: "embodied image" and "bodily design intention". However, before coming to the definition of these concepts, we need to describe the specifics of the understanding of corporeality in the East (since in its purest form this specificity is expressed in the art of oriental calligraphy, we use the works of Chinese and Japanese masters of writing as "visual keys"). In order to make it more understandable, to concretize the content of the desired concepts, we will "illustrate" them with examples from the design practice of modern Asian designers.

It should be noted that in the West, architects, not designers, were the first to develop the "bodily approach" in design. Among the Russian-speaking researchers engaged in the description of "bodily thinking" in architectural design, one can name M. R. Nevlyutov and S. V. Petrushikhina. In his recent dissertation, M. R. Nevlyutov explains that in the context of the "bodily approach" architecture becomes a "thing" created by human hands, as a craft object. It is not only perceived by different senses, but also viewed in the perspective of the "possibilities" that it opens up to the body ^[5].

Over the past ten years, a number of English-language publications on "body thinking" in design have appeared. Nunez-Pacheco, S. Sfligotti, etc.), however, there are no relevant studies in Russian yet. It should be noted that English-language research is mainly aimed at finding new design methods within the framework of the "body approach", and not at building a theory of "body-oriented" design. The exception is the scientific articles of the American architectural and design theorist J. Dithelmas dedicated to "embodied design thinking" (Eng. "embedded design thinking"). Actually, we will rely on them in the framework of this study.

The most important theoretical book for us will also be the repeatedly published book by the famous Japanese graphic designer Kenya Hara "Design of Design" (2003), in which the author urges Western designers to change their "way of thinking" and start "thinking" with their whole body.

1) The specifics of the Eastern understanding of corporeality

K. Hara writes about the fundamental difference in bodily perception between Western and Eastern designers. According to him, a Western person thinks with a brain that processes information from the five senses, while from the point of view of Eastern medicine, there is a "brain" in the entire human body, "like acupuncture points" (Figure 1) ^{[6, pp. 64-65]}. K. Khar's words are confirmed, for example, by the way physicality is understood in the "body-oriented" Western phenomenology of architecture: its representatives are just convinced that "the sensations received by the body through the senses are combined [by the brain] into one holistic experience" ^{[7, p. 682]}.

For Oriental people, an important role is played by the bodily feeling of "resonance" with the world, that is, "thinking" with the body. Pointing to this point, the modern Hong Kong philosopher of technology Yuk Hui quotes the following words from a commentary on the metatext of the Far East – the Canon of Change: "'Changes' cannot be comprehended, cannot be made, but when they are used [in divination], they connect the entire universe." The point is that when a fortune-teller resonates with the world, he "knows" the whole world, that is, his fortune-telling is extremely accurate ^{[8, p. 352]}. Yuk Hui uses this passage to show that the appeal to bodily intuition is deeply rooted in Chinese culture and that it is in this direction that it is necessary to develop the philosophy of technology in China.

Oriental designers strive for a physical sense of resonance with the world today, so they consider the creation of a project as a spontaneous process, and the form as "open" to the meanings lived by the body.

Despite the similarity in the understanding of "physicality" in China and Japan, these regions have their own traditions of body perception and understanding of bodily experience, which largely determines the specifics of shaping in Chinese and Japanese design. Let's show this difference through examples of modern calligraphy, since through writing hieroglyphs, the bodily experience of the writer is translated in the purest form (according to the fair remark of the Russian sinologist V. V. Malyavin, calligraphy is "perhaps the most accurate image of the bodily cognition" ^[9]). It is no coincidence that calligraphy in the East is called "the art of fitting a person into the world."

According to V. V. Malyavin, for the Chinese, "being is a world sphere, and its rotation transforms the chaotic diversity of the "organic body" into the void integrity of a Great Unity," ensuring human communication with the world ^[9]. An important role in this vision of the world is played by the bodily sense of continuity of the stationary center of the "world sphere" (memory of the state when the body is at rest) and the dynamic center of the body in motion.

In Chinese calligraphy, the memory of a body at rest is expressed through a clear connection of the hieroglyph with the axes of the sphere in which it is "inscribed". In particular, the modern Chinese calligrapher and artist Zibin Dong writes that the "tension" in the art of Chinese characters arises precisely because the strokes of the hieroglyph do not coincide with its "lines of force" (vertical, horizontal and diagonal axes) ^[10]. It is significant that in the works of Zibin Dong, the "lines of force" and structural points of hieroglyphs are preserved with the almost complete disappearance of the hieroglyphs themselves, that is, the experience of the body is completely unrelated to the feeling "flesh" (Figure 2).

As for the Japanese worldview, in the context of the same idea of the "world sphere", the Japanese have a more important role to play the relationship "external" – "internal". We are talking about understanding space as a "wrapped" void ^[12]: the enveloping layer is always felt as a conditional, two-dimensional, "facade".

Thus, in the calligraphy of one of the largest Japanese calligraphers of the twentieth century – Yukei Teshima (1901-1987) – through the external irregularity, asymmetry of hieroglyphs, as well as through the physically tangible effect of "molten steel" (when ink drops fall on a gray stroke), an "inner", "luminous" void is asserted ^[13] (Figure 3). At the level of "bodily consciousness", we are talking about achieving through external practice of calligraphy a certain state of mind–body, which the Chinese researcher of Buddhism Jinsong He calls "calligraphic enlightenment" ^[15].

2) Design thinking as a bodily process

Today, no research on the "bodily approach" in design, as well as in epistemology, cognitive linguistics, etc., is complete without reference to the scientific works of the American philosopher M. Johnson. His most important merit lies in the fact that, recognizing the existence of conceptual thinking, M. Johnson makes it dependent on the experience of the body. In order to describe the mechanism of formation of "embodied" meanings, M. Johnson develops the term cognitive (or conceptual) metaphor, that is, "a stable correspondence between the sphere of the source and the sphere of the target, fixed in the linguistic and cultural tradition of a given society" ^{[16, p. 86]}. The point is that, for example, in order for the prepositions "in" or "on" to be used in the language, there must be an experience of interaction with the container in the human body.

The American architectural theorist J. Johnson refers to M. Johnson. Diethelm suggests that the concept of "design" should mean "a purposeful intentional process that involves creating something new (or reconstructing something existing) for a specific purpose." At the same time, under the intentionality of J. Diethelm understands the direction of human attention ^[17].

It is no coincidence that, publishing in the largest Chinese design magazine "Shè Jì", J. Diethelm suggests that design (the name of the magazine) should be understood as "bodily" design, or "time is the place of reality of [bodily] experience" ^{[18, p. 58]}. Justifying his position, J. Diethelm relies on the meanings of the Chinese characters forming the word "design". The first hieroglyph "shè" 設 means "to create", "to design" (from the point of view of J. Dithelma, at the level of the "embodied [in the body] mind", or "embodied mind"), and the second – "jì" 計 – "evaluate" (according to J. Dithelm, to produce a body-lived, or "embodied meaning"). J. Himself. Diethelm does not explain why he associates the meanings of hieroglyphs with human bodily experience, however, we believe that he does this because "in their most primitive form, Chinese hieroglyphs represent images of human bodies and their experience of interacting with the environment" ^{[19, p. 34]}. In other words, J. Diethelm sees the prospect of developing Chinese design as "embodied design thinking."

Despite the fact that, unlike the Chinese, the Japanese simply borrowed the English word “design”, they also understand design thinking as a bodily process. It is no coincidence that the recent book by the famous Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa is called "Embodied", or "Embodiment [through the body]" (2018). Explaining his understanding of design, N. Fukasawa writes: "I try to design not from the point of view of creating something new, but rather from the point of view of helping people realize what they actually already knew." And further: "... perhaps I am trying to express an image that already exists inside me. No, I'm definitely trying to reveal the image of the archetype that is inherent in all people."^[20]

3) "Cognitive metaphor", or image-"xiang", as the "bodily" basis of design.

One of the fundamental concepts of Eastern philosophy is the concept of "image". Without going into details, we note that the Chinese researcher Yuxin Jia identifies the "xiang" image with the "conceptual metaphor" of M. Johnson, because, according to him, the image is established by "drawing an analogy with the body", which allows a person through his own bodily and social experience to "understand and experience the rest of the world" ^{[19, p. 37]}. The hieroglyph "xiang" itself is "an image of an elephant based on the location of the bones of a dead elephant", since the ancient Chinese practically did not see live elephants ^{[19, p. 38]}. That is, both the pictographic hieroglyph "xiang" and the very concept of "xiang" indicate something existing at the level of a vague, blurred image-sensation.

In the theory of design (and even more broadly, in the theory of creativity), in our opinion, it would be more appropriate to talk about the initial appearance of the "embodied image". Let's explain how "embodied images" work using an example from the field of graphic design, namely, using the example of a series of posters by Chinese designer Jianping He, created by him for an organization promoting the development of Oriental culture and arts (Asian Culture and Arts Development Alliance), together with Taiwanese female calligrapher Yangtze Dong (Figure 4).

To use one of the conceptual metaphors described by M. Johnson, a calligraphically written hieroglyph always expresses the bodily experience of wandering, but not linearly, "source-path-goal", but in a more complex spatio-temporal way (visually, the hieroglyph is tied into a "knot"). The fact is that "space in China is a wholeness akin to that embodied in a hologram or Leibniz monads: all its points are communicating, permeate each other, and a change is equivalent, in essence, to a change in the angle of view" ^{[22, p. 8]}. We are talking about the perception of space as a "hollow" body.

Like the human body, a calligraphically written hieroglyph also has certain structural connections. Actually, Jianping He seeks to show these structural connections in his posters using a computational algorithm applied to the Yangtze Dong hieroglyphs. At the same time, many thin lines connecting the strokes of the hieroglyph with each other allow him to show that the space of the hieroglyph is three-dimensional. That is, as a graphic designer, Jianping He reveals to the viewer the meaning of the traditional art of Chinese calligraphy, which absolutely corresponds to Yangtze Dong's desire to broadcast the living force of Chinese tradition in a new way in his works ^[23].

The "xiang" images are understood somewhat differently in Japan. As far as we can tell, the hieroglyph "xiang", which is read in Japanese as "xie", is associated with Buddhism by the Japanese, since the term "the doctrine of images" is one of the names of this religion. It is no coincidence that Yu. Teshima calls his direction in calligraphy "sese", combining the equally readable hieroglyphs "image" and "letter". His understanding of the "image" tends more towards visual gestalt, although the calligrapher is interested in fleeting moments that lead to the removal of the opposition of "I" and "not-I": in his works, he captures, for example, images of collapsing houses or the flight of a swallow ^[14].

Creativity of Yu. Teshima has a strong influence not only on modern Japanese calligraphy, but also on the relatively young trend of the so-called "designer calligraphy" (yap. "design-shodo"). Visual gestalts are addressed, for example, by one of the most famous calligraphic designers Hidetoshi Mito. He writes that in "designer calligraphy" it is important to be aware of the meaning of the words you write in order to give them an image. For example, when he uses Santoka Taneda's haiku for the design of a postcard ("Mountain camellias bloom and fall"), he takes an oil painting brush to convey the feeling of camellias through writing, making the signs rounded ^[24] (Figure 5).

Since in the framework of the study we are interested not only in the figurative and schematic structures of human interaction with the environment as the bodily basis of design, but also the very intention to transform reality, let us turn to another, no less important, concept of traditional Chinese philosophy, which allows us to better understand the specifics of the Eastern design thinking that is forming before our eyes.

4) Design and creative intention "and"

Before turning to one of the most complex concepts of Chinese philosophy, we note that the concept of "design intention", or "projectness", was actively developed by domestic design theorists. The most complete definition of the project intention was given by O. I. Genisaretsky. According to him, the project intention is "a reflexive and communicative realization of the root aspiration of human life activity [to transform the world] and the axial time in which it impulsively advances" ^{[25, p. 398]}.

The design intention assumes that the designer has a volitional attitude to transform reality. O. I. Genisaretsky considered design creativity as a dialectical ascent between a phenomenally grasped, but disordered, meaning (absurdity) and a meaning brought to an ideal aesthetic state (aestheticism): "... the state of creativity is the ability to bring any given meaningfulness to absurdity – the removal of any identifications; but also the ability for consciousness to acquire a new structure, to search for another identification" ^{[25, p. 79]}. Accordingly, O. I. Genisaretsky understood the will to create as the will to the authenticity of meaning, that is, project creativity for him consisted in searching for an authentic image of the world (understood in the spirit of Platonism).

It cannot be said that Fr. And Genisaretsky ignored the topic of physicality in his research, but for him the human body acted solely as a condition for the mythopoeic content of any project activity. According to him, for example, the feeling of frailty of the body leads a person to desire "salvation, liberation or immortality", and the resulting excess of "numinous energy" is invested in "certain [design] creative enterprises" ^[26].

We are also interested in project intention as a direction of thought based on a person's bodily connections with the world. More specifically, we understand what "twisted" means "due to our bodily experience of forceful efforts and kinesthetic sensations accompanying the act of twisting ourselves or objects" ^{[16, p. 26]}. That is, the designer designs, for example, a cup not just in accordance with his speculative ideal or some archetype of the collective unconscious, but in accordance with his physical experience of interacting with other cups.

In line with the Eastern tradition, we also take into account that the design concept is not limited to the reproduction by the designer of the "gestalts" of his previous experience, but arises, first of all, as an analogy between the formation of the known world and the formation of a person (understood "bodily"), that is, it is lived by the designer as a "flash" of inspiration as a result of his "resonating" in peace ^{[27, p. 312]}.

From the point of view of Chinese traditional philosophy, the creative intention of "yi" 意 appears from the image of "xiang". The hieroglyph itself, denoting this concept, consists of the key (kit. "heart-consciousness") and phonetics 音 (kit. "sound"), which, in turn, depicts a standing man and a mouth with a horizontal line (researchers do not have a consensus on what this grapheme means). The "heart-consciousness" element "blue" included in the hieroglyph, on the one hand, is understood as a "window into the spiritual space of the universe" and is usually used as an analogue of the Western concept of "soul", and on the other hand, denotes a specific physical organ, indicating the fundamental inseparability of the conscious soul of a person from his body ^[28]. Anyway, "and" means something coming from the heart-consciousness.

In Eastern practices, "I" represents the flow of attention that allows you to control "qi". The Japanese researcher H. Murakawa gives such an example: when we imagine that "qi" is directed into the palm, the palm turns red (at the same time, he clarifies that the coordination of "and" and "qi" requires a person to work for a long time) ^{[29, 94]}.

Let's take a closer look at "and" as a concept of the traditional aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy. Chinese researcher Xiongbo Shi points out that the highest form of realization of the creative intention of "yi" is the spontaneous self-expression of the calligrapher, impossible without special "mental and psychological training" of the writer. We are talking about the so-called mental state of "mu-yi", or "lack of intention", which Xiongbo Shi associates with the state of "non–action" - "wu-wei", realized in a "spontaneous flow of correct actions" and requiring body training. In simpler terms, a calligraphic work turns out to be excellent when the calligrapher has no intention of making it excellent. However, "mu-i" is impossible without "yu-i", that is, the presence of intention at the initial stage ^[30].

One of the most famous modern Chinese designers and digital artists, Zhoujie Zhang, compares his design approach to the practice of calligraphy: "...I understand that masterpieces always come from very simple foundations and look [like they were created] effortlessly. But there is a lot of practice behind it. Like Chinese calligraphy, it looks like something very simple, but, in fact, each work is a unique masterpiece..."^[31].

Zhoujie Zhang uses Grasshopper software and algorithms to create furniture objects, so the "design" process itself lasts only "a second". A complex object (Figure 6) arises spontaneously, just as an image arises in the bodily consciousness of a designer or artist, and it is difficult to say in advance what exactly it will be. Zhoujie Zhang says that he "tries to stay away from [long-term] creation (design) of things /.../, making them more natural" ^[31]. Currently, furniture objects are cut, assembled and polished by hand, so they are available in limited editions, however, in the future Zhoujie Zhang plans to use artificial intelligence technology in order to automate the production process.

Zhoujie Zhang creates whole series of different chairs, justifying this by saying that everyone will find the option that is closer to him. As far as we can judge, we are not talking about the translation of democratic values through this, rather, this is what V. V. Malyavin means when he writes that "the nature of things is not an unchangeable given", "things are more fully revealed if we are able to see them very different" ^{[21, p. 152]}.

One of the largest Japanese designers Tokujin Yoshioka strives for spontaneity in his work. Answering the question of what the design process is, T. Yoshioka says that "there are no special rules" and in his case the approach itself is important, not sketching. He does not construct the shape, the shape is obtained naturally during the experiment ^[33]. In other words, if Zhoujie Zhang's "projects" arise spontaneously due to the unpredictability of the result of a computer calculation, then Tokujin Yoshioka's "projects" arise during a chemical or physical experiment. In the search for an approach, the designer starts from the properties of the material.

As an example of one of T. Yoshioka's products, one can cite the “Memory” chair for the Italian company Moroso with a cover made of aluminum-based fabric (Figure 7). This fabric retains the shape that is given to it, so we can say that the chair has no shape and, at the same time, has an unlimited variety of shapes. According to the designer himself, "this chair can remind us of the beauty in nature with its constantly changing manifestations, as well as create the impression that there is no place for the project here" ^[35].

Let's return to the concept of "and". In Chinese classical texts, the concept of "and" is usually defined by a hieroglyph with the same key – "zhi", which stands for "intention", "aspiration" and, in a broad sense, "movement of the soul". The hieroglyph comes from the sign "zhi" – "go", located above the grapheme "heart", that is, it can be interpreted as indicating the direction of the heart-mind ^{[36, p. 484]}.

In the context of the Canon of Change, the intention of "zhi" may or may not be realized, depending on whether external (Heavenly predestination) and internal (accumulated virtue) circumstances are favorable for its realization. That is, the "intention" always belongs to a person and the world at the same time. It is carried out at the "point of resonance" between the formation of the world and the formation of man himself. In the language of biologists, the realization of an intention is always the result of coevolutionary processes.

A person's interaction with the world also includes his interaction with other people – feeling the intentions of another person. Communication between people is made possible by bodily intuition. It is bodily intuition, or heightened sensitivity, that is indicated by the expression popular among martial artists: "He does not move, and I do not move; he barely moved, and I moved before him" ^[9]. The commentary text of the "Canon of Changes" says: "It's not that I'm looking for a blind (stupid) child, but that a blind (stupid) child is looking for me; our aspirations ("zhi") respond" ^{[37, p. 53]}. The point is that the student's aspirations to know the truth and the teacher's aspirations to transfer knowledge are not just consistent with each other, they coincide at the moment.

Let's give an example of how such an understanding of creative intention affects the design process of Chinese designers today. So, in one of his interviews, Jianping He said that in 2006, a French designer, who was elected president of the International Federation of Graphic Designers at that time, instructed him to make a catalog of works by new members of the federation. When this designer pronounced the words "new year book" in English with a strong French accent, at first these words seemed to Jianping He like something like "new ear book" (English "book of the new ear"). Subsequently, Jianping He called this moment a "flash of inspiration", and made a catalog with an image of the ear on the side of the binding. He called the book "New Voice", that is, "New Voice", referring to the voices of the new members of the federation. (Figure 8) A Chinese interviewer commented on Jianping He's story as follows: "The case cannot be reproduced or foreseen, but we can grasp the necessity hidden behind the accident" ^[38].

Attention to the moment has been particularly developed in Japanese art and design, where it is still customary to show the connection of a work or product with a specific season. An example is the design of the booklet for the opening of the Winter Olympic Games in Nagano (1998), proposed by K. Hara: the text on the white cover is typed with recessed unpainted signs, creating a feeling of footprints in the snow (Figure 9). Here, not only different channels of perception are involved, but the designer's personally experienced feeling of peace is conveyed, which a person experiences when stepping on clean snow (there are impressions of written signs on thick sheets of cardboard, but there are no painted footprints).

It can be said that K. Hara creates not a "craft", but a "poetic" image of design, if poetry is understood as a form of transmission by a person of his more subtle "bodily" experience of meeting the world. The result of such a meeting is a bodily response, which is, in fact, the poet's sense of relief when he finds the right word for his poem (what the American philosopher Y. Gendlin calls "felt sence", or "felt [by the body] feeling"). Let us add to the above that initially this emotional and value response of a person was embedded in the very concept of intention "and" (this response was fixed in Chinese texts by the concept of "qing" (情), which later came to mean only "feelings" ^[39]).

Conclusion

We believe that the "body approach" in design can be implemented not only and not so much through the use of the "gestalts" of previous experience by the designer in a new project situation (Western concept), but through the intuition of the future, allowing him to create a product that will be in demand by society in the future (Eastern concept). Methodologically, we can talk, for example, about the development of a direction that has already received the name "embedded storm" in English literature (by analogy with "brainstorming"), when, in order to generate a project idea, living conditions for a certain bodily experience are specially created for the designer (up to the creation of scenery and the invitation of professional actors).

In the course of the study, we tried to describe the content of two important concepts necessary, in our opinion, for the development of the theory of "body-oriented" design:

1) The "image embodied [in the body]" is a spontaneously emerging figurative-schematic structure of human interaction with the environment. The embodied image is completed to the project image already at the mental level – with further analysis of the requirements for the project (operation of the project image occurs, to use the term J. Dithelma, in the "intentional field", serving the designer as a kind of "mental workplace").

2) "Bodily design intention" is the orientation of thought towards the transformation of reality, based on the designer's bodily connections with the world. Bodily intention allows the designer to anticipate the image of the future, which has not yet taken shape at the level of his project consciousness.