Irresistible brushes or open stickies? : bodystorming vs brainstorming

What is the effect of skilful coping in multistakeholder co-design activities? During a 2 months research-through-design project, we explored the potential and the effect of bodystorm techniques in comparison with more commonly used brainstorm techniques. Would bodystorm techniques have the potential to increase people’s level of engagement or even the quality of the outcome of the co-design process? In two separate co-design workshops, we invited residents of the neighbourhood Vaartbroek in Eindhoven, employees from the housing cooperative Woonbedrijf and civil servants from the Municipality of Eindhoven to generate ideas and initiatives for creating a selfempowered community. Although the presented research is an explorative experiment, we see a tendency that exploiting bodily skills in the co-design process has a clear impact on engagement and cooperation, which even seems to influence the quality and value of the concepts produced. The bodily involvement of participants elicited a direct engagement and a (pro)active, empathic and responsible attitude, propelled by personal experiences. Bodily engagement pushed participants away from the abstract towards concrete ideas. Moreover, the merging of different perspectives resulted in more faceted proposals. This poster we will explain and exemplify these findings that show the potential of embodiment in co-design processes.