It is April time has passed fast! When you learn new things, you don’t realize time flying. Anyhow, let me tell you about what I learned about bodystorming one of my most interesting classes. In the class, we were asked to determine difficulties people with disabilities encounter on the university business school building.

After bodystorming, we noticed the building was not adaptable for disabled people. The exit doors were too heavy for a person on a wheelchair, the tables could not accommodate a person on the wheelchair, the signage is unclear, there is the inadequacy of lift press buttons, and the elevators are too small for wheelchairs.

The reason we used bodystorming instead of brainstorming. Bodystorming generated ideas that could not have been perceived through discussions or sketching. Bodystorming facilitated empathy in the environment of probable answers for prototyping. When an individual is stuck in the ideation stage, bodystorming can promote your idea to maturity.

My experience from bodystorming is, using your body to describe a problem, or an idea enhances innovation and creativity. Bodystorming stimulates empathy that creates a better understanding of the problems.  At the end of the process, we came with the solution of placing elevators at the centre to enhance accessibility, better signage, and safe sides at every side of the building to enhance ease of escape for disabled people in case of fire. The most intriguing idea was providing disabled people with an access card that can open all doors. An app was also recommended just in case they forgot their cards.

In my understanding, bodystorming is an interaction technique that spans empathy, ideation, and prototyping using bodily expressions. Individuals have firsthand understanding and experience of a situation to generate new ideas. There is a firsthand interaction with the environment that triggers the choices you make. It is simply, ‘putting one in someone’s shoes’ this triggers empathy of the real victims.

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