Building design agency through bodystorming

When addressing urgent issues such as climate change and the social impacts this will have on our future living environments, as designers and design educators, we must critically ask ourselves if the mindsets, approaches, processes, methods, and tools we know are appropriate or need inquiry to evolve. This paper presents an experimental technique the authors have been applying in the past four years of teaching in an international design studio that aims to imagine products and services for future uncertain times. In planning the course the main challenge was to understand which would be the best method for designers to really engage with change, grasping the complexity of a near or far future we might be experiencing. The bodystorm challenge intended to kick off the course immediately plunges students into a real-life condition which forces them to look for alternative solutions for basic daily activities. Over the years, students have been asked to conduct a two-week challenge drastically reducing either their consumption of energy, water, digital use, waste, overall expenditure, or by radically changing food habits, and mobility. The students also kept an online diary, on the publishing platform Medium, building a shared journal which displayed a jumbled mix of pictures, narratives, and drawings. First experimentations show how upstream bodystorming increases student’s agency by allowing them to deeply understand that they are fighting a major social battle against cultural beliefs, social practices, economic systems, existing artefacts and infrastructures and acting as a spark to more radical innovations.