Trust your gut: an edible exploration of Participatory Design language
Josymar Rodríguez Alfonzo, Liesbeth Huybrechts · 2024
Trust your gut delves into the embodied experience of feel-thinking with our guts. Grounded in Participatory Design's evolving embrace of relational and processual approaches, this situated action investigates how the acts of cooking, eating, and digesting together can inform and shape terms, concepts, and practices in the realm of Participatory Design (PD). Understanding the intersection of bodily experiences and language is crucial in 'thickening' our ways of doing PD. To this end, Trust your gut will engage participants' bodies in an interactive moment for collectively smashing, massaging, crushing, squishing, chewing, gulping and devouring materials and meanings. With the intention to develop a sensory-rich glossary, participants will explore the interplay between personal satisfaction, communal experiences, and materiality within their practices. Drawing on a digestion analogy, the situated action develops in three phases – indigestion, digestion, and excretions – with PD stages to facilitate collective exploration and reflection on bodily experiences and their integration into PD language. Ultimately, the situated action invites our guts to challenge the traditional conference scenario as we embrace the sensuous, dirty, messy and complex nature of lived experiences and interactions. Reaching out from within and connecting through what makes us all human.