Of Initiations and Curiosities #BodyFirst

Project Roadmap

Week — 1: Week of Initiations

We make our first inroads into the project space through a few activities.

#Visual Brief: What are the synergies I currently see with the project brief?
We build a visual brief to communicate our initial thoughts and ideas.

#What is the/a body?
We explicate our current definition/understanding of the body through the creation of an artifact that ‘embodies’ our conception of it. This is also accompanied by a concept note.

Week — 2: Week of Curiosities

We begin to build a repository of questions that we will attempt to answer through our explorations in the next four months. And, ground our work through key readings and activities.

#Unpacking the foundational text
We unpack ‘Six Themes for the Next Millennium’ by Juhani Pallasmaa in groups and question, draw parallels, agree and disagree on how and if such themes relate to the body. Initial probes such as the following set the tone for this discussion:

• What are our body curiosities, really?
• What do we know of the body?
• What do we want to know?
• What is that missing information?
• How do we start reconnecting with our own bodies as a starting point to understand this ‘tool of tools’?

#Identifying the gaps in our practice
How does my chosen discipline of study and design practice (majors, here at Srishti) look at, understand and comprehend the body? What are the gaps?

We list our ponderings as a set of questions.

#Identifying a Somatic Practice + Selecting a journaling method
We pick a daily somatic practice that we shall be journaling everyday to understand what it does to our own bodies — in terms of how the body responds to, changes, adapts and speaks to us — and our bodily experiences and insights that emerge from it.

#Start an Insights Diary/ Sketchbook for the Project
This is where we document our everyday work/ ponderings/reflections which shall serve as a critical touchpoint for tracking our daily progress and feed into our final documentation.

#Perspectives (Extends across weeks in the form of multiple masterclasses)
We start looking at the current landscape of understanding of the body, and wisdom traditions that have informed us across the ages with insights shared by various experts and practitioners on topics such as Eastern and Western philosophical thought, Traditional and Modern Medicine, etc.

#Read ‘Somaesthetics’ — Thinking Through the Body and Designing for Interactive Experience
This chapter provides us with an overview and current state-of-art in terms of Somaesthetic Design — and will help inform our future explorations and potential project trajectories.

Week-3: Week of Immersion

How do we then observe, record, and document these bodily observations and arrive at bodily insights that can inform our discipline?

We get the opportunity to delve deeper into our own bodies, and hopefully start seeing connections through bodily insights by means of the processes we undergo during full-day Bodywork Sessions with a Somatic practitioner.

Week-4: Week of Distillation and Envisioning

How do we approach these insights, understand them critically, consciously, mindfully, to inform our own craft, our own approach then, to create authentic, informed experiences, interactions, artifacts and technologies for the future, that respect and complement the body, rather than imposing onto it?

We are now working towards building our proposal through a conscious selection of our line of inquiry-based on our own primary questions that we have arrived at through readings, exposure and our own daily somatic practice.