ReEmbodying: Boatbuilding,
Social Imagining, and the Senses

MFA Communications Design Thesis 

This thesis explores the centrality of the body in shaping our lived experience and perception of the world. It aims to reveal connections and divides between the body and the mind and between the body and technology.

Through a series of self-ethnographic anecdotes and design instantiations that traverse the sensory in-between, this thesis unfolds how our body informs our identity, our interaction with others, and our interaction with our environment. It discusses how non-verbal communication can facilitate a confluence of minds and advocates for cultivating presence through attention to bodily sensations as a path to reflection and environmental attunement.

The ultimate goal is to construct a new sympoietic framework to mend our fragmented, disembodied, and depersonalized communication practices through visceral, emotive, holistic engagement and embodied sensory experiences. In setting forth an emplaced view of human existence as fundamentally interrelated and bound by a reciprocal exchange with nature, this thesis underscores our responsibility to approach the living world and technological mediation through a more embodied lens.