Somaesthetic Design - by Michael Arnold Mages & Stephen Neely (Paperback)

About the Book

A somaesthetic foundation for design practice, foregrounding the experiencing body and the temporal dynamics of felt interaction.

Book Synopsis

Over the past twenty-five years, design practice has expanded from making objects to shaping experiences that unfold in-time. As this expansion has accelerated, designers have gained powerful new tools - but often without a shared language for shaping embodied experience. Somaesthetic Design: The Experiencing Body and the Dynamics of Time responds by focusing on the experiencing body as a key source of design knowledge. Drawing from embodied practices and performance traditions, Michael Arnold Mages and Stephen Neely give designers a shared vocabulary and framework for understanding, crafting, and evaluating lived experience as it is felt and sustained in time.

Review Quotes

»Though the essence of the design is interaction, designing is mostly taught and practiced as something visual or cognitive. This rich book is an important corrective, especially since the bodies it helps designers sense are not ergonomic machines, but emoting, dancing, meaningfulness-yearning ways of being-amongst-others. Michael Arnold Mages and Stephen Neely build out a comprehensive yet always practical philosophy for not just interaction design and service design, but all forms of design as the composing of dynamic, timeful experiences.«-- "Cameron Tonkinwise, Professor of Design Studies, University of Technology Sydney"

About the Author

Michael Arnold Mages (PhD) is a designer, strategist, and musician. He teaches in the Information Design and Data Visualization and Experience Design programs at Northeastern University, where he is an assistant professor of design in the Department of Art & Design, and director of the Health and Wellness Design Lab.

Stephen Neely (PhD) is a teacher, conductor, theorist, and clinician who lectures and presents workshops in the fields of design, music, architecture, and pedagogy. He is the Milton and Cynthia Friedman associate professor of music and director of graduate studies for the Carnegie Mellon University School of Music.