"Embodied" design thinking: Western and Eastern approaches

The relevance of the research is due to the ignoring of the topic of corporality in Russian Design Studies due to the dominance of the semiotic approach in it. The authors consider the phenomenological theory of architecture, supported by a number of domestic researchers, to be the most productive, from the point of view of revealing the topic of corporality in the design research. The purpose of the article is to identify culturally determined differences in Western and Eastern approaches to "embodied" design thinking in order, ultimately, to be able to assess the prospects for the development of "bodily-oriented" design in Russia. The methodological basis of the research is based on general scientific methods of description and comparison with elements of comparative analysis. In the course of the study, the authors of the article note that English-speaking specialists rely on new approaches in cognitive science of recent decades. Since one of the most important conclusions of post-cognitivism is the idea that meanings are created in a proprioceptive way, Western designers tend to create an environment in such a way that it pushes a person to move and freely explore space. On the other hand, the results of the research of post-cognitivists contributed to the fact that the shape of an object or interface began to be considered by designers in terms of their communicative qualities. From a methodological point of view, the ideas of post-cognitivists contributed to making design more contextual and adaptive. In this regard, there is some kinship between the "Western approach" and the "Eastern approach", however, "embodied" design thinking is considered in the East not just as thinking based on the designer's own bodily experience, but as an instrument of his poetic "resonating" with a single body of the world.

embodied design thinking, embodied cognition approach, bodily experience, multisensory, optical flow, affordance, synesthesia, ganying, tong, basho