Embodied Breaching

Embodied breaching

Agnese Caglio

Agnese Caglio has a background as an industrial designer and studied IT Product Design at the University of Southern Denmark in Sønderborg. Her project is about breaching normally invisible bodily routines by modifying everyday objects. Agnese modified conventional cutlery (e.g. forks and spoons) such that they have a ring instead of a shaft. The redesigned cutlery can be attached to a finger. The material changes eating behavior. Eating routines do no longer work smoothly. The redesign challenges the motoric skills involved in eating. Children spend a long time on learning how to eat properly with a spoon or fork. The resulting highly automatized behavior and the work involved in it becomes accessible through the embodied breach.

The project investigates how people engage with unfamiliar objects, and learn to experience and to manage them. Agnese’s design interventions make the bodily routines and their relevance to everyday life visible as e.g. the compensatory strategies that subjects use to be satiated. Embodied breaching can develop into a design tool to create analytic distance to ‘seen but unnoticed’ embodied ways of handling material artifacts in daily life.