Two distinct research traditions have arrived, by very different routes, at the same insistence: that the designer's body matters. Höök's (2018) somaesthetic interaction design, developed through years of practice-based research at SICS and Mobile Life in Stockholm, argues that cultivating heightened bodily awareness gives the designer access to forms of knowing that cognitive methods alone cannot reach. The systems psychodynamics tradition, drawing on Bion (1962), Menzies Lyth (1960), and the Tavistock group relations conferences, argues something both related and fundamentally different: that the practitioner's body is not only a site of their own perceptual capacity but a receiving station for what the system cannot think - that what the designer feels may not be their own material at all, but something deposited in them by the defended institution they are working within.
Both traditions are right, and the distinction between them matters enormously for what design practice needs. The Immateriality and the Sensual post explored the paradox that service design shapes experiences with significant embodied dimensions while lacking the methods to engage with those dimensions directly. The Body as Container post traced how projective identification turns the designer's body into a container for the system's unbearable affects, and asked the question that design discourse has largely avoided: who contains the designer? This post sits between those two arguments and asks what follows from taking both seriously - not as theoretical commitments but as practical realities that demand professional infrastructure design has not yet built.
Two bodies, two problems
Working with Höök and the wider Mobile Life team at SICS on somaesthetic design gave me direct experience of what cultivated bodily awareness can produce. The methods are deliberately slow: body scans, attentive movement, breathing practices drawn from somatic traditions, exercises in noticing proprioceptive and interoceptive sensation that most professional contexts train people to ignore. The premise is that a designer who has developed this capacity for attending to their own embodied experience will notice qualities in the interactions they design that cognitive analysis alone would miss - a rhythm that is slightly off, a tension in a transition, a quality of engagement or disengagement that registers in the body before it becomes articulable as a design insight.
This is a genuine and valuable capability. The somaesthetic tradition, grounded in Shusterman's (2008; 2012) philosophical project, treats the body as a site of "sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning" (Shusterman, 2012, p. 111) - an instrument that can be tuned through practice. Höök's translation into design methodology is rigorous: the designer's body becomes a research instrument, and somaesthetic practice is the calibration method. The ski instructor analogy from the Immateriality post is precise here: the instructor's embodied knowledge of the terrain, the student, and their own movement is not a supplement to pedagogical theory but the core professional capability. Somaesthetics proposes that design should develop an equivalent.
The systems psychodynamic tradition starts from the same observation - the body knows things the mind has not yet articulated - but arrives at a radically different account of what the body knows and why. Projective identification, as Lawlor and Sher (2021, p. 15) describe it, is the mechanism by which unwanted internal states are not merely attributed to another but unconsciously lodged in them, such that the recipient begins to feel and act as though they own the projected material. The designer working in a defended institutional setting does not only perceive the institution through their body; the institution perceives through the designer's body, depositing its unthinkable material in the nearest available container. The anxiety, confusion, deadness, or rage the designer experiences may be diagnostic data about the system rather than information about the designer's own state.
This is the distinction that matters: somaesthetics trains the designer to attend to their own perceptual experience; psychodynamics reveals that what they are attending to may belong to someone else. The first requires training in attention; the second requires training in containment. Both require professional infrastructure that design, as a discipline, has not yet developed.
The legitimacy problem
Across both traditions, the practitioner's felt sense functions as evidence - not as supplementary colour for a propositional account, but as primary data about the situation being worked with. At the Experio research seminar last week, Hay (2026) described the clinician's body as "our instrument" and insisted that "what you make me feel is information". In the Forum Theatre work with mothers who had lost custody of their children, they described in the seminar, the mothers iterated through eight versions of a caseworker encounter based on what "felt wrong" - not on propositional accounts of what was wrong, but on a pre-personal registration of relational failure that required time and iteration to articulate.
The Connected Tension post explored this through Heron and Reason's (1997) framework of extended epistemologies: propositional, presentational, experiential, and practical knowing. Design research's default mode operates primarily in the propositional and presentational registers - workshops that produce maps, journey diagrams, specifications, things that can be evaluated, circulated, and defended in institutional settings. What both somaesthetics and psychodynamics call for is sustained engagement with the experiential and practical registers: not what participants can say about their experience, but what their bodies know about the conditions they inhabit or that their practices or habitus has engrained in their bodies and ways of presenting.
The problem is that experiential and practical knowing, while epistemologically valid in Heron and Reason's framework, are professionally illegitimate in most institutional contexts. A designer who says "the journey map shows a failure point at stage three" is speaking in a register the institution can receive. A designer who says "I felt a deadness in the room when we discussed discharge planning, and I think that deadness is the institution's defence against knowing what happens to patients after they leave" is speaking from countertransferential experience - and in most design contexts, that statement would be received as personal opinion, emotional overreaction, or unprofessional conduct. The Designer's Role, Authority and Countertransference post argued for countertransference as the designer's primary instrument; but the argument is easier to make theoretically than to operationalise in practice, because the professional structures that would legitimate it have not yet been established.
Social work has long negotiated this boundary. McLaughlin, Beresford and others (2020) document how experiential knowledge in mental health services has "consistently encountered reservation, caution and hostility" from institutional frameworks structured around propositional evidence (p. 17). The field has, however, developed professional structures for working with it: clinical supervision, reflective practice, training in recognising and processing projected material. The legitimacy of experiential knowing in social work is partial and contested, but it is at least structurally supported. In design, this structural support has not yet emerged.
What supervision provides
The professions that routinely work with projected material - psychotherapy, clinical psychology, social work, organisational consultancy in the Tavistock tradition - share a structural feature that design practice has not yet developed: mandated supervision. Supervision in these professions is not mentorship or line management; it is a containing relationship specifically designed to help the practitioner distinguish between their own material and what has been deposited in them by the client system. The supervisor's task, as Lawlor and Sher (2021, p. 25) describe it, is to help the consultant "pay attention to their countertransference reactions" - to notice what they are feeling, to hypothesise about its origins, and to use that hypothesis as data about the system rather than acting it out.
This infrastructure provides three things that design practice has not typically provided.
The first is discrimination. Without supervision, the designer has no reliable way to distinguish between "I feel anxious because this project is difficult" and "the system is depositing its anxiety in me because I am the nearest available container". Both feel identical from the inside. The somaesthetic tradition would treat the anxiety as perceptual data to be attended to; the psychodynamic tradition would ask whose anxiety it is. Supervision provides the relational context within which this question can be asked and - tentatively, provisionally, revisably - answered. Without it, the designer is using an uncalibrated instrument: they can sense that something is present, but they cannot determine whether it belongs to them, to the system, or to the interaction between the two.
The second is protection. The Body as Container post traced the cumulative somatic cost of carrying a system's projections without adequate containment. The clinical literature offers two complementary accounts of how unexpressed psychodynamic material becomes inscribed in the body. Van der Kolk (2014) traces the neurological pathway: trauma produces "actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain's alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant" (p. 4). The memory of helplessness is stored as muscle tension in the affected body areas; the nervous system remains mobilised against a threat that belongs to the past. Traumatised people, van der Kolk argues, "chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: the past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort" (p. 12). The body keeps the score through musculature and nervous system reorganisation - through the felt sense of a body that cannot stand down.
Maté (2019; 2022) traces a different but convergent pathway through the immune and endocrine systems. Where van der Kolk's mechanism is neurological, Maté's is immunological: the chronic suppression of emotion - particularly anger and the capacity to set boundaries - produces sustained physiological stress that eventually manifests as autoimmune disease, cancer, and chronic illness. "The anxiety of anger and other 'negative' emotions like sadness and rejection may become deeply bound in the body," Maté writes; "eventually it is transmuted into biological changes through the multiple and infinitely subtle cross-connections of the PNI apparatus, the unifying nexus of body/mind" (2019, p. 25). The body "says no" when the person cannot; the illness expresses the boundary the psyche was unable to set. Both accounts converge on the same structural point: the body registers and accumulates what conscious awareness suppresses, deflects, or is prevented from articulating - and without adequate containment, the accumulation becomes pathological.
Menzies Lyth's (1960) foundational study showed that nursing's defensive structures existed to protect practitioners from precisely this accumulation - the intolerable anxiety of sustained proximity to suffering. When the defences were removed without alternative containment, nurses could not sustain the exposure. The parallel to design is direct: if designers are to use their embodied experience as data - if they are to stay open to what the system deposits rather than defending against it - they need containing structures that prevent unprocessed material from becoming damaging in the ways van der Kolk and Maté describe. Supervision provides this. Design practice, currently, does not.
The third is accountability. A therapist working with countertransference has an obligation to ensure they are not projecting their own material onto the client system - not misreading their personal anxiety as systemic data, not acting out their own defences under the guise of interpretation. Supervision holds this boundary. Brothers (2014, p. 3) notes the "growing body of evidence to suggest that therapists are at risk for traumatization by their clients"; the supervisory relationship exists in part to ensure that the practitioner's response to this risk does not distort the work. Without equivalent structures, design practitioners who begin working with affective and embodied data have no external check on whether they are using their felt sense accurately or misattributing their own states to the systems they are working with.
Hay as a case in point
Hay's (2026) Experio seminar provided a vivid illustration of what happens when a practitioner does have this infrastructure and what it enables. His description of the Forum Theatre work - eight iterations of a caseworker encounter, each adjusted based on "felt wrongness" - was psychologically sophisticated in a way that depended entirely on his clinical training. He could stay with the mothers' embodied experience without rushing to represent it because he had the psychological training to hold pre-propositional material. He could describe "what you make me feel is information" because he had a theory of countertransference that gave that statement epistemic standing. He could cultivate "connected tension" in the child welfare agency because he understood, from clinical experience, the boundary conditions of the window of tolerance and what it takes to expand it safely.
The analysis notes on what Hay's work has to do with design identified that the thing making his practice psychologically sophisticated - staying with pre-propositional felt sense, resisting premature representation - works against design's representational logic. This post adds a second dimension to that observation: the thing making his practice safe and accountable is his psychological training and the supervisory traditions it carries with it. When Hay says "our bodies are our instrument", he speaks from within a professional tradition that has spent decades developing the methods, safeguards, and relational structures needed to use that instrument responsibly. A designer saying the same thing - "my body is my instrument, and what I feel in this institutional setting is data" - speaks from within a professional tradition that has not yet developed equivalent infrastructure. The statement is the same; the conditions of its responsible practice are entirely different.
This is not an argument that designers should become therapists, or that design should import psychoanalytic supervision wholesale. It is an observation that if design practice is to take embodied knowledge seriously - if somaesthetic awareness, countertransference, and affective attunement are to become part of the designer's professional repertoire rather than informal and unacknowledged dimensions of practice - then the discipline needs to develop the containing structures that make such practice safe, accountable, and sustainable. Without supervision or its equivalent, designers working with projected material are operating with an uncalibrated instrument in conditions where miscalibration can cause real harm: misattributing their own anxiety to the system, absorbing institutional projections without the capacity to metabolise them, or - perhaps most commonly - simply burning out from the cumulative weight of unprocessed affect.
What this means for the discipline
The somaesthetic and psychodynamic traditions converge on a claim that design's institutional structures are not yet equipped to support: that the practitioner's body is a legitimate source of professional knowledge. Höök (2018) makes this claim from the direction of trained perceptual capacity; the Tavistock tradition makes it from the direction of countertransference and containment. Both are right, and both point to the same infrastructural gap.
The gap is not theoretical. The theoretical arguments for embodied knowledge in design are well developed - across Shusterman's (2008; 2012) philosophical programme, Höök's (2018) methodological translation, Akama's (2015) work on bodies and culture as design materials, Vink, Hay and Duan's (2025) relational turn, and the systems psychodynamic literature on projective identification and containment (Bion, 1962; Lawlor and Sher, 2021; Menzies Lyth, 1960). The gap is institutional and infrastructural. Design programmes do not typically train students to work with projected material. Design practices rarely provide supervision for practitioners exposed to defended institutional dynamics. Design's epistemological norms have not yet come to legitimate felt sense as evidence. And design's professional culture has generally not distinguished between the somaesthetic claim ("I have trained my perception to notice what is happening in my body") and the psychodynamic claim ("what is happening in my body may not be mine"), treating both as vaguely interesting but ultimately supplementary to the propositional knowledge that journey maps, blueprints, and specifications produce.
The consequence is that embodied design practice, where it occurs, is unsupported and unaccountable. Practitioners who develop somaesthetic sensitivity or who find themselves carrying institutional projections do so without the professional infrastructure that would help them use these experiences productively. Some - like Hay, with his clinical psychology background - bring the infrastructure from another discipline. Others develop informal containing relationships: trusted colleagues, reflective practice partnerships, personal therapy. Most simply absorb the cost, experiencing the cumulative effects of unprocessed institutional affect as personal stress, disillusionment, or burnout - the phenomena the Body as Container post described as the body keeping the score.
The question for design as a discipline is whether it is willing to develop the institutional infrastructure that its own theoretical commitments require. If the body matters - if somaesthetics and psychodynamics and affect theory and relational ontology are not just theoretical positions but accounts of what design practice actually involves, and as Tonkinwise argues the design material that services are themselves shaped from, and with - then the discipline needs supervision, or reflective practice groups, or training in working with projected material, or some other structure that performs the containing function these traditions have spent decades developing. The alternative is to continue making theoretical claims about embodiment while leaving practitioners structurally unsupported in the embodied dimensions of their work - which is, as Strathern (2003, p. 8) might observe, a form of audit: "concerned with process rather than substance", governing the discourse about embodiment while leaving the practice of it ungoverned.
References
Akama, Y. (2015). Being awake to Ma: designing in between-ness as a way of becoming with. CoDesign, 11(3-4), 185-196.
Bion, W.R. (1962). Learning from Experience. Heinemann.
Brothers, B.J. (2014). The Abuse of Men. Routledge.
Hay, A.F. (2026). Designing public services from within: relational adaptations in child welfare. Presentation at Experio Research Seminar, 6 March.
Heron, J. and Reason, P. (1997). A participatory inquiry paradigm. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(3), 274-294.
Höök, K. (2018). Designing with the Body: Somaesthetic Interaction Design. MIT Press.
Lawlor, D. and Sher, M. (2021). An Introduction to Systems Psychodynamics. Routledge.
Maté, G. (2019). When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Vermilion.
Maté, G. and Maté, D. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Vermilion.
McLaughlin, H., Beresford, P. et al. (2020). The Routledge Handbook of Service User Involvement in Human Services Research and Education. Routledge.
Menzies Lyth, I. (1960). A case study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety. Human Relations, 13(2), 95-121.
Shusterman, R. (2008). Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge University Press.
Shusterman, R. (2012). Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics. Cambridge University Press.
Strathern, M. (2003). Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. Routledge.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. Penguin.
Vink, J., Hay, A.F. and Duan, S. (2025). Reimagining service design through relational perspectives. Journal of Service Research.