Designing with the body
I often work with people who are holding complexity, designers, facilitators, leaders, lawyers, and activists. We usually talk about ‘sense‑making’ as if it mostly lives in the mind. But our bodies and our nervous systems are actually involved. Before we think … our bodies are already responding.
This piece is about how complexity lives in the nervous system and why embodied knowing is important for the way we design and respond.
Complexity lives in the nervous system first
Most of us in social and systems design are working in complex environments with overlapping crises, organisational pressures, limited time and human impact. Mostly, we focus on cognitive approaches, developing frameworks, creating strategy and delivering reports. We talk about ‘sense-making’, yet I do not believe we are actually using our senses in our work. Senses live in our bodies, not in our minds.
Neurobiologically speaking, any data or stimulus we encounter crosses the threshold of our bodies first. Before we make sense of any situation, our bodies are already organising around safety, threat or connection. Our heart rate, our breath and the way we hold our muscles changes. Our attention narrows or widens. This all happens before cognition. Our bodily responses influence how we make sense, and how we respond.
When we do not understand this, we can easily make decisions from chronic urgency, collapse or numbness. These are not usually the best decisions. We can act from our adaptive stress responses. We can over‑promise when we are in fawn, or withdraw from necessary conflict when we feel shutdown or over‑control when we feel threat. Learning to notice these states and how they feel, and treating them as data is one way to start designing differently.
Regenerative design: listening to living systems
Regenerative design asks us to work relationally with living systems, rather than focusing on isolated symptoms or problems. That means tuning into cycles, relationships, patterns and limits. The thing is that we can’t actually do that if our own systems are stuck in depletion or hyper‑drive. Let’s unpack that…
Embodied knowing supports regenerative work in at least three ways:
- It helps us sense when a project, team or community is over‑extended, even before burnout shows up in our staff surveys
- It lets us feel the difference between extraction and reciprocity, e.g. when a ‘participation’ process is actually taking more than it gives. (Is this even regularly considered?)
- It invites us to build practices of rest, resourcing and repair into the way we work as part of how we design systems that can sustain life over time.
Regeneration is also about the inner infrastructure of the people doing the work, our nervous systems, our capacity to be with what is, as well as our ability to return to connection after stress. When taking a relational lens, this is more important that ever.
Trauma‑informed design: safety, choice and embodiment
Trauma‑informed practice offers a strengths‑based framework for care, safety and empowerment in design and research. It asks us to attend to things like safety, choice, collaboration, diversity, trustworthiness and empowerment.
Without embodied knowing these principles remain mostly conceptual. Teaching people about their nervous system has been the hidden curriculum within my trauma-informed trainings for years.
In practice, trauma‑informed design means noticing:
- What happens in your own system when someone discloses something hard in a meeting or workshop.
- How your nervous system responds when a project timeline starts to shrink and there’s pressure to push through despite signs of overwhelm.
- Whether you’re able to stay present and curious, or whether you move into fixing, distancing or control.
Somatic awareness makes this visible. It helps us to recognise when we’re in protection so we don’t unconsciously reproduce the very dynamics we’re trying to change. It also lets us co‑design practices that honour people’s nervous systems through pacing, choice, breaks, multiple ways of participating, rather than assuming everyone can stay ‘on’ all day.
Trauma‑informed design isn’t just about protecting participants. It’s also about cultivating the inner capacity of practitioners and teams so they can stay with complexity without burning out.
Decolonial design: disrupting disembodied logics
I have been exploring how I have internalised colonial values for a little while now. Decolonial work asks us to examine the values we’ve inherited, including extraction, control, productivity at all costs, urgency, disconnection from land and lineage. I invite you to check out the 12 values of colonisation from Tema Okun and sense into how they show up within you. Many of these values live in our bodies as much as in our institutions as perfectionism, over‑work, shutting down sensation or overriding our limits.
Embodied knowing matters here because:
- It reveals where colonial patterns are felt, not just thought, e.g. in the pressure to always be productive, to minimise emotion, or to treat our own bodies or other folks bodies as tools or resources.
- It invites us to listen to signals from land, ancestors and community through the body.
- It supports practices of slowing down, feeling, grieving and re‑connecting that are often necessary for genuine decolonial work but rarely included in project activities.
Decolonial somatic work suggests that liberation is not only structural….but it is also somatic. As we learn to sense and trust our bodies, we become more able to resist the internalised rhythms of extraction and urgency and to inhabit different ways of being together. We so need this!
A simple practice
I would love to share a little way to work with embodied knowing in design and change spaces.
Before making a decision, pause and ask:
- Where is my body right now?
- What does my nervous system seem to be organising around? Safety, threat, performance, or collapse?
- From this state, what kinds of futures am I most likely to imagine?
Sometimes I stay with those questions for a few breaths. Sometimes I add a small orienting practice as a little pause e.g. feeling my seat, letting my gaze scan the room, or noticing my feet making contact with the ground.
Over time, this has changed what I say yes to, which has also meant saying no to projects that felt misaligned in my system. It has meant adjusting timelines or plans to honour nervous‑system realities. It has also meant noticing where my own conditioning wants to rush, fix or perform, and choosing to move differently. This has been powerful.
Embodied knowing can bring us valuable information to support the co-creation of more life-giving futures.
An invitation to practising embodied knowing together
If you’re curious about this kind of embodied listening, there are a couple of somatic spaces I’m hosting right now:
- Decolonizing through the body: A somatic practice circle with Kaia Hawkins exploring how colonial patterns are held and moved through the body.
- Being with your nervous system in complex times: A four‑session practice circle for practitioners working in complexity who want to build capacity, reduce overwhelm, and grow more choice in each moment.
We’ll be experimenting with simple repeatable somatic tools.
You’re warmly invited if you’d like to explore why embodied knowing matters in the way you live and work.