Teaching the Act Where Every ‘Body’ Matters!!

The act of design deals with transforming artifactual systems for creating, modifying, or extending human experience. With the emergence of technology as a powerful mediating tool, the idea of experience shifted from tangible, embodied to intangible, cognitive dimensions. However, the disruptive pandemic of COVID-19 has made us recognize the real tangible, embodied dimensions of sensorial experience in everyday life and also in Academia. Academia has faced the dual challenges of justifying technology-mediated teaching as a substitute for sensorial experiential learning on one hand, while teachers and students themselves living a pandemic-induced materiality of existence on the other hand. This paper explores the meaning of engaging teachers and learners in the act of design through pedagogical task design where everyone matters with their full participation of body, mind, and self. This line of inquiry has implications for the way teaching and learning dialectically influence each other in certain domains of design learning including but not limited to design foundation studies, furniture and spatial design and accessory design, etc.