Nested Bodies
Fermentation as Embodied Praxis

A critical and process documentation thesis paper
submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Master of Design, Interaction
Design, Emily Carr University, 2021.

Julie Van Oyen
Bachelor of Kinesiology,
University of British Columbia (2012)
Bachelor of Design, Interaction Design,
Emily Carr University (2019)

Abstract
The craft practice of fermentation prioritizes embodied know-how in
the maker, and collaboration between the practitioner, fermenting
microbes, and other beings and elements implicated in the process. This
project draws from embodied design research methodologies to develop
a material fermentation practice into a process-led research praxis,
wherein theories of embodiment and the relational bodily self can be
explored. This project then proposes how this embodied, multispecies
praxis may cultivate a deeply relational connection between humans and
the ecosystems they are embedded within, in order to conceive of and
exercise more caring relations.
Keywords
Embodied design, embodied knowledge, fermentation, multispecies,
praxis, relational self

This thesis is typeset in Cormorant Garamond and Aboriginal Serif
(https://www.languagegeek.com/font/fontdownload.html).
© Julie Van Oyen, 2021.

Acknowledgments
Thank you to my supervisor Katherine Gillieson, for
your unending support, thorough reviews, and infectious excitement during the development of this
project and document.
Thank you Rita Wong and Lisa Grocott for your
reviews and thoughtful comments, which have been
instrumental in shaping what this document is today.
Thank you Sonia, Max, and Tamar for sharing your
sourdough starters with me, and thank you to the ferments’ microbial constituents for sticking around as
I bungled my way through learning to work together.
Thank you to Bob for never once complaining about
the proliferation of bubbling jars and odd smells in
our home through the course of this project (and for
a while yet, probably).

Contents
2
3
5
7

i. Abstract and Keywords
ii. Acknowledgements
iii. Land Acknowledgement
iv. Glossary of Terms

8
10
13

25

1. Introduction
2. Bodies of Work
3. Case Studies
3.1 Lacto-fermented Cabbage: Making-With
3.2 Sourdough: Nested Bodies
4. Embodied Knowledge and the Relational Self
4.1 Embodied Know-How:
Disrupting mind-body duality in the practitioner
4.2 Embodiment:
Destabilizing anthropocentric views of interaction
4.3 The Emergent Relational Self
4.4 Embodying a Relational Interaction Design Praxis
5. Conclusion

27

v. Reference List

20

Land Acknowledgment

This work took place on the unceded territories of
the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh
(Squamish) and Səlílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh
(Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

As someone seeking to become a good relative, I
gratefully acknowledge not only where this work
took place, but the ways in which responsibility to
the living land have informed it. This project is concerned with confronting and disassembling ideas
and perceptions of human-nature duality. It recognizes how their residual effects impact the real, lived,
experiences of colonial ideologies and their related
systemic forces including extractive economic systems and instrumentalist views of the living world. I
hope that by questioning the ideological foundations
of these harmful relationships, this project may in
small ways serve just and sustainable ways of living
and working.

“We also refer to the land and our bodies with
the same root syllable. This means that the flesh
which is our body is pieces of the land come
to us through the things which the land is. The
soil, the water, the air, and all other life-forms
contributed part to be our flesh.”
- Jeannette Armstrong,
Keepers of the Earth

“…But I am talking now
of the way the body speaks,
and the wind, that keeps saying,
firmly, lovingly:
a little while and then this body
will be stone; then
it will be water; then
it will be air.”
- Mary Oliver, What the Body Says

Glossary of Terms
Embodied Design
Design ideation, speculation, engagement, and analysis in which the body and its senses are engaged “to
be leveraged in an emergent design space” (Wilde et
al., 2017, p. 5159). Drawing primarily from theories of
phenomenology, pragmatist aesthetics and embodied cognition, it encompasses “embodied, embedded,
and enacted minds” (Wilde et al., 2017, p. 5159).

Interaction Design
The design of interactions between beings (human
and/or nonhuman) and tools, systems, and/or services. These may or may not be comprised of digital
elements. Their design takes into account wide-ranging considerations such as aesthetics, motion, sound,
space, time, subjective experience, and behaviour
(Höök, 2018).

Embodied Knowledge or “Know-how”
Knowledge held within and distributed across the
body, which enables us to conduct a task or series
of tasks without needing to be consciously aware
of the individual actions taken. This knowledge is
developed through sensory perception, bodily experience, repetition and physical memory (MerleauPonty, 1962).

Praxis
According to Merriam-Webster, praxis is the practical application of a theory. In the context of this
project, a material fermentation practice becomes
an embodied research praxis wherein theories of
embodiment and the relational bodily self can be
explored (Hey, 2017).

Fermentation
A material craft practice in which practitioners aim
to produce ideal conditions for a specific multispecies community of microbes (bacteria, molds, and
yeasts) to proliferate within a food substrate. The
microbes’ metabolic activities within this food alters
it to possibly become more nutritious, preserved for
a period of time, and distinctly flavoured (Redzepi
and Zilber, 2018).

Relational Self
Carrying alongside the sense of the self the recognition that we are interconnected on a fundamental
level with all other beings, and the elements of the
earth and air, into our lives and work (Hey, 2017).
There is no separation between our bodies and the
ecosystems we are a part of (Armstrong, 1995, 2002).

1. Introduction
The dominant traditions of Western thought have long favoured the analytical mind and symbolic language as characteristics which set humans
apart from the rest of the living world, propping up ideals of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism (Rodman, 1980; Eckersley, 1992; Armstrong, 1995). Eckersley (1992) defines anthropocentrism1 as “the belief
that there is a clear and morally relevant dividing line between humankind and the rest of nature, that humankind is the only principle source of
value or meaning in the world” (p. 51). These ideas have resulted in massive
and widespread exploitative relations enacted by humans on ecosystems
and other beings. As observed by Okanagan scholar Jeannette Armstrong
(1995), this Western lens promotes displacement and disparity between
self and ecosystems, and can be seen as incongruent with being a healthy,
whole person or community. This renders us unable to enact good relations with other beings and ecosystems. In Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics
in More Than Human Worlds, Marìa Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) identifies
a need for creating alternative ethics of collectivity and care within our
living world. However, for a revolution in ethics to occur, a revolution in
perception must first develop (Rodman, 1980).
This project explores fermentation as an embodied praxis for shifting
perceptions and resisting oppressive hierarchies between human and
non-human beings and systems. Conducting research from a body-first
perspective invites into the work ecosystems within which our bodies are
nested (and which we have nested within us), in order to help cultivate the
notion of a relational self which connects to (and wishes to conserve) the
living world and beings around us. An embodied approach has potential to
directly counter ideas of human exceptionalism: it conceives of our beings
not as detached objects clearly separated from the world, but rather as
always corporeally embedded within it, and therefore inseparable from it.

[1] Anthropocentrism is a
complex, layered, and laden
term. Other definitions have
been explored within the field
of environmental ethics; see
Brennan & Lo (2020).

8

Interaction design has much to offer and explore within embodied research,
as it is concerned with motion, space, subjective experience, and behaviour.
Additionally, as emerging technologies are moving interactions out from
behind screens and into the surrounding world, interaction design is
increasingly concerned with “the intertwined relationship between us as
living organisms, acting changing, creating tools and systems in the world,
and us at the same time making these tools part of ourselves” (Höök, 2018,
p. 31). In my exploration of fermentation as embodied praxis, I will first
introduce the embodied research methodologies I have adapted for this
project. Second, I will describe the layered and embodied fermentation
work through which I have explored embodiment, the relational self, and
the linkage between the human body and our shared, more-than-human
worlds. I will describe how fermentation is not simply a material craft
practice; it deals with soma, the subjective body-self, movement, sensory
engagement, and experience — all matters of concern within embodied
research and interaction design. Finally, using the framework offered by
Wilde et al. (2017), I will reflect on how embodied research such as this may
position us to explore our relational selves, contributing to a situated sense
of designing in and with the living world we inhabit.

9

2. Bodies of Work
I am the first to say that I am not necessarily an artisan when it comes to
fermentation. My practice has been relatively basic from a craft perspective, and at first glance one may not see any designed outcome or object at
all. However, the intent is not to find solutions, but rather to establish the
craft practice of fermentation as a praxis through which to explore ideas
of embodiment and the relational self working in collaboration with multispecies agents (Hey, 2017). According to Merriam-Webster, praxis is the
practical application of a theory. As a designer, I use craft tactics (if even
in a basic sense) to interact with ideas to develop sensitivities and shape
approaches for designing in and with the world. There are methodologies within the social sciences and humanities, the arts, and within design
itself, which have been developed to take a body-first research perspective.
I have selected and adapted methods from them in order to develop a
material fermentation practice into an embodied research praxis wherein
theories of embodiment and the relational bodily self can be explored.
Due to its open character, embodied research is practiced across fields,
disciplines, and cultural contexts (Spatz, 2017). There is a rich lineage of
embodied theory, research and practices within the visual and performing arts (see Vicuña, as cited by Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007;
Olsen, 2002; O’Connor, 2005; Berrigan, 2014; Spatz, 2017), social sciences
and humanities (Chadwick, 2017), with particularly important contributions by intersectional feminist scholars and practitioners taking
nonwhite/ nonwestern perspectives (see brown, 2019; Lorde, 1984/2020;
Kimmerer, 2014; Pinto, 2020; Simpson, 2017). Within mental health disciplines, therapists have been exploring healing trauma and reconnecting
with and decolonizing the self through bodily awareness and somatic therapies (Menakem, 2017; van der Kolk, 2015). Eco-philosophers, often led by
eco-feminist perspectives, have been employing the body as a physical and
10

conceptual pathway to sensory integration with living ecosystems (Haraway, 2016; Margulis & Sagan, 2007; Abram, 1996).
For this project, the greatest influence has come from the work of Indigenous Okanagan scholar Jeannette Armstrong, whose work relates how
the Okanagan word for body contains as its root the word for land (1995,
2002). She describes how this notion of land and body as inextricable
implicates the human into a reciprocal relationship to land through their
body: “The land feeds [us]; but we feed the land as well….we give our bodies
back to the land in a really physical way” (2002, 5:56). This is done through
applying the body to care for the surrounding land, and to vocalize its
needs in all community decision making processes (Armstrong, 2002). The
body as vessel for the living, knowing land has been a core concept in
their work, which is often missing or incomplete in Western examples of
embodied praxis. Additionally, these ideas trouble the ideological foundations of extractive and instrumentalist views pervading Western thought
and action2.
A guide for bodily design discourse has come from the work of researchers Danielle Wilde, Anna Vallgårda, and Oscar Tomico. Their embodied
design framework enables designers to describe their research and contextualize it alongside their peers in the field, in order to build a more connected community of embodied design researchers (2017). They describe
embodied design as involving ideation, speculation, engagement, and
analysis methods which put the role of the body in the fore. They also give
an initial practice review which maps the various practitioner- researchers
in the field. Other creative practitioners such as Ben Spatz (performance)
and Kristina Höök (interaction design) have also offered methodologies
through which to work through embodied experience.
2.1 Fermentation as Embodied Praxis
In Embodied Research: A Methodology, Spatz (2017)describes embodied
research as similar to action, practice-based, and performance research
methodologies, but distinct from them in the degree to which it centres
embodiment. The primary objects of investigation are the possibilities
and potentials of individual or multiple bodies, and their subjective sensory perception, movement, emotion, and embodied knowledge, practice
and technique (Spatz, 2017). According to Spatz, technological research
might ask: “What can metal do? What can networked computers do?” Discursive
research might ask: “What can poetry do? What can mathematical figures and
symbols do? What can musical notation do?” Meanwhile, embodied research
asks: “What can bodies do? What can fingers do? What can bodily rhythms do?”
(p. 5). Here, to keep the subjective, experiencing body at the forefront of
inquiry, I have asked: What can an embodied craft practice of fermentation do?

[2] Armstrong (2011) tells
us that in order to move
beyond human exceptionalism, non-Indigenous people
must learn from Indigenous
scholarship and knowledge.
This can be done in dialogue,
with respect and humility,
following Indigenous understandings of reciprocity with
place and with each other
(Armstrong, 2011).

11

Höök (2018) invites us to reframe how we understand interaction design,
a predominantly symbolic and language-oriented discipline, as one which
centres bodily movement and sensory appreciation. She calls on designers
to engage deeply with and get to know “the material” of the experiential,
subjective body, its sense and affordances (also known as the soma) (Höök,
2018). Her rationale for the importance of developing body-first sensitivities centres on designing better and healthier emerging technologies,
but also touches on ways in which humans may connect with other living
bodies via their soma. For example, she recounts her personal experience
of riding a horse and describes the perception that together they were
forming a “centaur self” (Höök, 2018, p. xvi). The more relaxed she became
during the ride, the less she consciously thought about what was happening, the more cohesive and collaborative they were as a pair. This lens has
been particularly generative within the context of my project.
Following these notions, fermentation may be considered an embodied
research practice due to the prioritization of embodied know-how in producing successful (delicious and nutritious) ferments (Hey, 2017). Embodied
knowledge or know-how is knowledge held within and distributed across
the body, and is developed through sensory perception, bodily experience,
repetition and physical memory (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). This knowledge
is not centralized in the analytical mind; rather, it does not differentiate
between mind and body at all, and results from their interdependence
(Höök, 2018). Examples of embodied know-how range from everyday
activities such as riding a bicycle, to crafts such as weaving, dance, and
taste-testing ferments.

12

3. Case Studies
This project involves a material practice of fermentation through which
I have explored these ideas of embodiment, the relational self, and multispecies collaboration. As an interaction designer accustomed to designing digital applications and services, my early forays into designing for
human-nonhuman interactions were dominated by these kinds of tools:
for example, an at-home fermentation app and a citizen science platform
reporting on forest health. However, with each new concept, I felt more
strongly that the most interesting and informative interactions were those
between humans and nonhumans themselves, rather than with the digital
mediator in between.
In Thoughts on Interaction Design, John Kolko (2011) defines interaction
design as the “creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, system, or service” (p. 15). Systems need not be digital; according to Donella
Meadows (1993), a system “must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose”. As seen in the example of an ecosystem, these elements may be living (or nonliving) beings,
and their entangled dependencies for life may be considered purposeful
interconnections (Meadows, 1993). Furthermore, as described by Höök
(2018), interaction design takes into account wide-ranging considerations
such as aesthetics, motion, sound, space, time, subjective experience, and
behaviour (2018). The moving, sensing and perceiving body is therefore as
much the material of interaction design as are digital tools and systems.
On these grounds, interaction design may concern itself with dialogues
between bodies and ecosystems.
Heather Paxson (2008) relates the material practice of fermentation as
part of modern craft knowledge, which connects us not only to traditional
homesteading practices and our own cultural history, “but to our environ13

ment on the deepest possible level” (p. 117). It is a material craft practice in
which practitioners aim to produce ideal conditions for a specific multispecies community of microbes (bacteria, molds, and yeasts) to proliferate
within a food substrate. These microbes find their way into the mix from
the food itself, the ambient environment, and even the fermenter’s hands
(Hey, 2017). The microbes’ metabolic activities within this food alters it to
become more nutritious, preserved for a period of time, and imbued with
particular flavour (Şanlier et al., 2019; Redzepi & Zilber, 2018). This produces food and drink such as sourdough bread, injera, miso, sauerkraut,
cheese, kimchi, kombucha, beer, kefir, saké, and wine. Fermentation has
a long history, and is practiced cross-culturally: due to its place-based
nature, it is an important identifier of heritage foodways and cultural
groups. For example, many regions throughout the world have their own
traditional fermented foods which have been prepared for centuries (Nout
et al., 1983). These are often used to signal group identity (Jang et al., 2015),
and to support food sovereignty efforts (Yotova, 2017; Ham, 2017), as well
as alternative food economies of giving or trading ferments (Jasarevic,
2015; Katz, 2016).
Ferments proliferate and perish according to the conditions provided by
the practitioner, the food substrate (flour, soybean, cabbage, etc.), and the
surrounding environment, making it an “emergent and context dependent
process” (Hey, 2017, p.153). Due to this dynamic and shifting nature, fermentation privileges embodied know-how, specifically the development of
knowledge that is distributed across the senses: even a novice fermenter
can often more easily tell whether a ferment is ready by smelling or tasting
it, than by reading a description in a recipe book. This develops a collaborative relationship between the maker’s body and the ferment, which when
examined holds implications for one’s experience of being a subjective,
perceiving body embedded in the world, with others.
The following two case studies recount the specific techniques and methods that were employed in order to explore these implications. Embodied
research methodologies encouraged starting with the lived experience, by
which practitioner-researcher engages first through their own body. This
involved a solo3 embodied practice, in an at-home fermentation lab. Aside
from the fermentation practice described above, methods also included
written notation and multimedia documentation in order to archive and
document the work. The written notation documents the project using the
form of a practitioner narrative, for its descriptive and subjective quality
(Spatz, 2017). As Spatz (2017) describes, a practitioner narrative works by
folding technical detail into a story about a particular moment of practice
(p. 22, 2017). The written notation also includes speculative and embodied
drawing4: a method for thinking- and moving-through via the overlapping

[3] “Solo” as in one human
body/practioner/participant/
maker/eater; this of course
contains multitudes of
micrbiota in and on the body.
[4] See page 23 for an
example of how speculative
drawing enabled thinking
alongside Wilde et al.’s
(2017) framework. The small
sketches explore transformation, motion, and conceptions
of wholeness beyond mindbody connection.

14

of the material, experiential, and visual (Topfer, 2011-2014). The exploratory nature of speculative drawing often allows it to take shape in the
midst of questions and thinking that is unclear and unsure.
3.1 Lacto-fermented Cabbage: Making-With
Lacto-fermentation has been practiced cross-culturally for centuries to
preserve seasonal fruits and vegetables. Bacteria present on their surface,
such as Lactobacillus, convert sugars in the plant matter into lactic acid
when submerged in a salt brine. This acidity inhibits the growth of other
microbes which may compromise the livelihood of those working together
in the ferment (Christensen, 2020). Once fermented, they can be kept in a
cool dark place (such as a cellar or refrigerator) for months on end (Christensen, 2020). The lacto-fermentation of cabbage has a long history, and
is practiced in various regions to produce culturally important ferments,
such as kimchi in Korea and sauerkraut in Europe, Russia, and North
America (Nout et al., 1983).
This case study drew inspiration from my experiences helping my mother
can local peaches and tomatoes as a child: long summer days filled with
fragrant boxes of cull fruit from a friend’s orchard, hot glass jars, and bubbling juice and syrup. Filled jar upon filled jar were laid out on old newspaper across the kitchen floor, my young but avid ears put to the task of
monitoring for the satisfying “pop!” of each one as it sealed. If they sealed
properly as they cooled, they would be stored in our cellar to bring the
taste of melting sunshine to the long winter darkness ahead of us. In Wild
Fermentation, Sandor Katz (2016) relates how using the microbes present on
the produce itself may preserve fruits and vegetables. The heat pasteurization we used when I was young would have killed much of these, which
in its own way preserved the food. Curious about a craft practice which
connects to place and human relationship, as canning with my mother
did, but also interested in human-nonhuman relationship, I moved to lacto-fermentation for this project.
Instructions were followed from recipes posted online such as Emma
Christensen’s (2020), author, editor, and graduate of the Cambridge
School for Culinary Arts. The exploration involved rinsing, peeling and
thinly chopping locally-grown organic cabbage, sprinkling and massaging
it by hand with sea salt, and packing it into a clean jar. Organic produce
was sourced to increase the likelihood that the microbes from the living,
local soil would still be present. Before chopping and packing I washed my
hands and the jar with soap and water, but did not follow hyper sanitization techniques such as those practiced in industrial cheesemaking and
other “fermentation” processes (Paxson, 2018). The cabbage was left open
on a countertop in my home for five or six days, and periodically pressed

Hold

Chop

Salt

Massage

15

with a smaller glass vessel that fit into the mouth of the jar, in efforts to
press the cabbage under the surface of its juices. The microbes present on
the vegetables, the ambient apartment air, and my own skin produced a
unique culture of fermenting microbes. These conditions produced a sauerkraut-like ferment that likely could not have been exactly re-created
anywhere else in this world (Dunn, 2018).
During this days-long process, in order to ascertain the state of the ferment, I would periodically smell and taste it, a sensory “attuning-to” relying on embodied knowledge to confirm whether or not it was time to
refrigerate and slow the fermentation process. At first it smelled like fresh
cabbage and mildly salty, but then over time, as the Lactobacillus and others proliferated, it began to smell sharper and funkier. In parallel, bubbles
appeared on the surface of the brine, the gaseous byproducts a further
indicator of active fermentation and the production of lactic acid. Once
it smelled and tasted appealing, I refrigerated it to stall the process at that
specific stage (though it did not cease to be a dynamic entity; it continued
to taste slightly more acidic over time, as I ate my way through the jar).
Microbes and I repeated this process many times for the duration of this
project, each time with different results. The ferments would taste different: more or less acidic, sweet, and/or “funky”. This variable funk-factor
at times produced an odour so pungent, I dared not feed the ferment to
myself or anyone else. It is difficult to describe in writing the difference
between good funk and bad, but the nose knows. Recipes from the online
community of lacto-fermenters urge: “...use your best judgement when fermenting. If something smells or tastes moldy or unappetizing, trust your
senses and toss the batch.” (Christensen, 2020). What I sensed as appealing correlates to what is safe, nutritious, and delicious for humans (Flachs
& Orkin, 2019). This knowing sensory perception has been developed
through human evolution for our wellbeing, but has developed alongside
others: it entangles our lives with the lives of ferments and other beings we
have been eating and living with throughout our shared histories (Flachs
& Orkin, 2019).

Fermenting

A ferment

3.2 Sourdough: Nested Bodies
After working with microbes to produce fermented cabbage, I was inspired
to expand my fermentation practice to sourdough by interdisciplinary
researcher Maya Hey. In her article, Fermenting Communications, Hey
(2017) explores how sourdough culture (the sharing of starters between
people) creates bridges of communication between human and nonhuman
bodies. A starter “born” in one kitchen can make its way through many
others by way of being shared; within it are “borne” the traces of other
bodies it has lived alongside.
16

A sourdough starter begins as nothing more than flour and water, left at
room temperature in an unsealed container. Over one to two weeks, a wide
range of microbes (including bacteria, molds and yeasts) from the flour
and water mix, as well as the surroundings, populate the mixture (Leonti
et al., 2019). The human fermenter must pay close attention to its smell,
consistency, and other qualities, in order to sense when it has been populated by the specific species needed for it to become a sourdough starter.
It will begin to smell like bread, and it must be regularly “fed” with flour
to support these flour-eating microbes and those which thrive within the
byproducts of this eating. Eventually, if successful, the necessary species
will proliferate and fall into balance alongside each other, forming a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts. This “culture” perpetuates itself due
to each of the species living best within the conditions made by the others’ metabolic activities (in particular, the acidity produced through the
metabolizing of flour) (Katz, 2016). It is this acidity that gives the dough
its characteristic “sour” flavour.
Once balance is attained, regular cycles of feeding with fresh flour and
water (weekly if refrigerated, once to twice daily if not) must be followed to
maintain it. As it is not an exact science, it is not necessary to be exact with
feeding measurements; usually, the amount of flour and water required to
feed it takes about half the volume of the starter itself. Here, what matters
most is being consistent and developing the embodied know-how to sense
how your starter is doing. Before feeding, the starters are halved in order
to maintain a volume appropriate for whatever jar or container they live
in, leaving room for them to bubble up with activity after being fed. The
discard from this may be used as a levain in foods such as bread, muffins
and pancakes, in place of industrially produced, dried yeast. If this cycle
is not consistently maintained (an admittedly easy occurrence) and the
starter becomes imbalanced, it may develop a rotten smell and black, grey,
pink, or green fungal or mould growth on the top. In these cases it is necessary to “backslop”: in other words, give a spoonful of it a fresh start in a
new, clean container with fresh flour.
All of the sourdough starters I work with are from other people. One
starter is from a friend, who received it from a friend, whom I have never
met, despite being connected in a rather intimate, bodily way through our
ferments. The second is a starter which hails back to 1940’s France, passed
through French and then Canadian bakers’ hands over generations, going
through countless microbial and human iterations before being given to
me by a professional baker friend who works at a locally-owned bakery in
Mount Pleasant, Vancouver. The third is a ferment born in the home of a
colleague, meaning that they started it in their own home from a simple
substrate of just flour and water. Thus began inter- and intra-species rela-

Feed

Mix

Fed

Rising

17

tionships, with the microbial cultures forming bridges between the multiple humans involved. With fermentation, “bodies meet despite differences
in time, species and scales” (Hey, 2017, p. 150).
Three ferments to feed daily amounts to quite a lot of hands-on work over
the course of a master degree. My fermentation practice ultimately became
more about my labour to sustain the starters, rather than the other way
around. Halving, then feeding, sometimes backslopping, and washing jars
and implements became an automatic process by which my hands worked.
The actions brought to mind thoughts of nested relations between my
sensing and working body, its microbes, and those of the land I am on, the
ambient air, the watershed, and the other human bodies who worked with
the ferments before me. My occasional consumption of sourdough bread
and pancakes from the sourdough discard (the result of halving) closed
the loop — my gut microbes consumed that which I had consumed, which
had consumed me. Occasions on which I had given the discard from my
starters to others (friends, family members, and colleagues) enacted this
process with yet another circle of human and microbial bodies.
Three starters

Balanced

Imbalanced (mouldy)

18

Make

Eat

Bake

19

4. Embodied Knowledge and the Relational Self
“So the recuperation of the incarnate, sensorial dimension of experience
brings with it a recuperation of the living landscape in which we are corporeally embedded.”
Abram, 1996, p. 65
The framework offered by Wilde et al. (2017) includes a set of questions
with which to analyze the fermentation practice, shifting it to an embodied research praxis. In efforts to better connect and align the embodied
design research community, they have developed and tested the following
questions through which to discuss the work:
1. “What is done to disrupt the usual way of doing [something] or the
current state of affairs?”
2. “What is destabilised by this disruption? What norms, traditions, structures or systems become — conceptually or physically — unstable?”
3. “What emerges from this destabilisation? What does it bring into
awareness? How is the previous landscape altered?”
4. “What does this entire process embody? What idea, quality, or feeling
does the process give tangible or visible form to?” (pp. 5161-5162)
The following sections will address each of these questions respectively.
4.1 Embodied Know-How:
Disrupting mind-body duality in the practitioner
Since ferments are in a shifting state of becoming, practitioners must
become aware of and attuned to minute biochemical changes to know how
and when to halve, backslop, feed, and eat a ferment. They must develop
visual, olfactory, auditory, and tactile sensitivity to assess its state at any
given time (Hey, 2017). Over time, this sensitivity is heightened by ongoing
20

encounters with ferments, building a “sense memory” (Hey, 2017, p. 153)
in the practitioner which carries over into successive making. This sensory sensitivity and memory culminates in an embodied knowledge that is
distributed across the senses. Recipe books cannot sufficiently substitute
for the embodied know-how that comes with the cumulative effect of the
maker immersing their senses in the process. In this way, fermentation
practice “distributes knowledge across the body instead of centralizing it
in the analytical mind.” (Hey, p. 153).
The two case studies in this paper provided rich sensory activity in the
midst of my days, which were otherwise spent sitting behind the computer
designing digital interfaces. The timing of my usual day was disrupted,
punctuated by repetitive physical movement and sensory experience
involved with washing, chopping, salting, massaging, packing, halving,
feeding, stirring, mixing, cooking, baking, sniffing, tasting, feeling, and
eating. The entangled needs of our living bodies shaped the structure of
each day. It highlighted the connection between a more whole, embodied
self and the living world, more so than I had felt in my design work for
some time.
4.2 Embodiment:
Destabilizing anthropocentric views of interaction
Höök (2018) explores phenomenologist Marcel Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of
embodiment as our subjective self, the way we perceive the world through
our bodily and social presence (p. xix). It is the way we perceive and experience; “always in the world, with our bodies, sociality, and practices — we
are inseparable from it” (Höök, 2018, p. xxi). Höök (2018) goes on to
explore this in a design context, emphasizing how a first-person, bodily
perspective (as opposed to third-person) may help designers design in a
way which cares more for the life-worlds they impact. The world we experience sensorily and subjectively through our bodily experience of everyday living must be considered: rather than individual, it is a collective
dimension — “the common field of our lives and the other lives with which
ours are entwined” (Abram, 1996, p. 40).
Over the course of this project, microbes from my body have joined the
multispecies community of microbes within the ferment (Dunn, 2018). This
community achieved a balance, but it has not solely been due to human action
that these conditions arose — it involved plants, water, air, and the microbes
themselves which produced conditions beneficial to their companion species also hosted by the starter. They then in turn metabolized the food to
become more nutritionally available to the microbes within the body of
the eater (as in gut microbes, etc.). In this project, we have all fed, worked,
and eaten — closing the circle of nested beings engaged together in inter21

dependent lifemaking (Haraway, 2016). Consequently, ideas of humans at
the centre of the implicated [eco]systems and life-making processes have
been destabilized.
4.3 The Emergent Relational Self
Embodied knowledge, when examined in the context of collaborative multispecies making, holds implications for one’s experience of being a subjective, perceiving body embedded in the world, engaged in life-making
processes with others (Haraway, 2016). This, along with the engagement
of our subjective self in the making and eating process, produces ongoing
multispecies engagements that can serve as the basis for cultivating a “participatory, relational self” (Heldke in Hey, 2017, p. 155). This in turn “dismantles the hierarchical separation” (Hey, 2017, p. 156) between human and
microbial agents of fermentation. We “do not precede their relatings; [we]
make each other” through our “irresistible attraction to enfolding each
other” which is the “vital motor of living and dying on earth.” (Haraway,
p.58) In other words, I have not “made” my ferments, they have made me.
I am now made up of flour from my local mill, water from my local watershed, and the microbes from multitudinal sources: these have become my
food, which has become the food of the microbes within my body. There is
in fact no separation.
Ongoing cycles of living and sensing together conducted over the course
of this project became a tangible, experiential way to explore ideas such as
those presented by Armstrong: “The soil, the air, and all other life-forms
contributed part to be our flesh” (1995). My flesh is made of the ferments
I have lived and worked with, and their “flesh” is made of me (and other
human/nonhuman collaborators along the way). As David Abram (1996)
describes in The Spell of the Sensuous, Merleau-Ponty describes a collective
Flesh which signifies both our flesh and “the flesh of the world.” (p. 66).
The Flesh is the intangible life matrix that generates both the perceiver
and the perceived as interconnected limbs of itself. It is the reciprocal
presence of the sentient in the sensible (other beings, which are sensed
by us) and of the sensible in the sentient (we are simultaneously being
sensed by those we are sensing). When approached this way, we can see
that our own sensory perceptions and soma are but our part of “a vast,
interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies” (Abram, p. 65). When we consider this, Abram (1996)
suggests it could influence our behaviour and dominant assumptions of
human exceptionalism.
Developing a relational self promotes a view of selfhood that is in relation to others, as opposed to separate or excepted from. In this way, the
human is decentred and agency is distributed across others involved in the
22

interactions (such as microbes) (Heldke in Hey, 2017). In fermentation,
“a relational self can frame the human(s) as neither the sole actor(s) nor
the sole eater(s)” of the process” (Hey, 2017, p. 156). It helps us reconceive
the human as simply one of many participants in a wider meshwork of
relationships. Through this project, I thought about my body and self
differently. It became more wondrously porous in concept and experience.
I thought about my design work differently. I saw how my social, subjective, aesthetic life was fully entangled with the lives of other beings (e.g.
received ferments from other humans’ homes). I understood all of this in
a subjective, corporeal way — truly from the inside out. Nothing, no one,
lives alone (Dunn, 2018). We are entangled in a meshwork of life which
is inextricable from itself: this is closer to Puig de la Bellacasa’s “ongoing
collective reimagining of ecological existences” within our living world, as
mentioned in the introduction.
4.4 Embodying a relational interaction praxis
In her book, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds,
Marìa Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) considers everyday activities of sustaining
and perpetuating life, and their potential to transform Western relations
to natural worlds as merely resources to support human life. To reimagine more caring relations, she uses a definition of care from Joan Tronto:
care “includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our
world so that we can live in it as well as possible” (as cited in Puig de la
Bellacasa, 2017, p. 3). This world includes “our bodies, our selves, and our
environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Tronto, in Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 3). An interconnected,
relational understanding of care is in line with Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017)
acknowledging the always-situated implications of care, and that to care
means to enter into a relationship of mutual obligation and reciprocity.
This extends to our work as designers. A change in the designer’s aesthetic
capacity, in an embodied sense through expanded sensory understanding,
in turn changes their approach to design. If built into the common repertoire of interaction design, an embodied sensitivity may contribute to
the development of a relational self in both the designer and the end-user
(Höök, 2018).
Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) engages with Merleau-Ponty’s conception of
perceiver/perceived being one and the same through touch, and then
extends this to say that to touch is to care: “In particular, touch’s unique
quality of reversibility, that is, the fact of being touched by that which we
touch, puts reciprocity at the heart of thinking and living with care.” (Puig
de la Bellacasa, p. 20). She describes this reciprocity of care as having less
to do with individual actors giving and then receiving, but by “a collective

Disrupt

Destabilize

Emerge

Embody

23

disseminated force” (Puig de la Bellacasa, p. 20). This collective force, as
enacted through the living and sensing body, can be experienced as something far greater than any human actor(s). When reminded of this, we can
consider ourselves corporeally embedded within the world, neither above
or below other beings, and responsible to act as such.
By following Armstrong’s, Merleau-Ponty’s, Höök’s, and Puig de la Bellacasa’s ideas, we can see that it is not simply the human body but a larger,
connected life-body we are implicating in our designs, and finally that
implicating this body necessitates a relationship of care and obligation not
just to the human body, but to the overarching life-body. As such, care for
the “body-self is not separable from peoplecare and Earthcare” (Puig de la
Bellacasa, p. 150). These ideas provide the framework for my fermentation
practice: by working via a material practice such as fermentation, engaging
with more-than-human actors such as microbes, plants, and water, and
following embodied design methods, I am implicating in my design work
the life-body or Flesh of which we are all a part, and myself in a caring
reciprocal and obligatory relationship with it.

24

5. Conclusion
The explorations within this project utilised an at-home fermentation
lab, selected and adapted embodied research methodologies, and involved
other exploratory work (such as drawings and sensory sketches involving
the body, sensory experience, and other beings), and practitioner narrative. Conducting research from a body-first perspective invited into the
work ecosystems within which my body is nested (and which I have nested
within me). Halving, then feeding, sometimes backslopping, and washing jars and implements became an automatic process by which my hands
worked. The actions brought to mind thoughts of nested relations between
my sensing and working body, its microbes, and those of the land I am on,
the ambient air, the watershed, and the other human bodies who worked
with the ferments before me.
Wilde’s et al. (2017) embodied design framework aided this work by offering prompts through which to discuss and contextualize the sometimes
difficult-to-describe work of embodied exploration. Through these, I have
described how a material fermentation practice holds implications for
one’s experience of being a subjective, perceiving body embedded in the
world, with others. Mind-body separation in the maker is disrupted, as the
praxis engages knowledge which is not centralized in the analytical mind.
Rather, it does not differentiate between mind and body at all, and results
from their interdependence. Ideas of human exceptionalism within interactions and making are destabilized: the human is not the only maker, nor
the only eater, of this process. The microbes the human seeds and feeds
within the ferment, in turn seed and feed the microbes within the human:
multiple human and innumerable microbial bodies form nested collective
bodies. A more relational self emerges, felt through the body as this sensitivity develops. Developing a relational self promotes a view of selfhood that
is in relation to others, as opposed to separate or excepted from. A change
25

in the designer’s perception, in an embodied sense through expanded sensory understanding, in turn changes their approach to design.
Building this kind of body-first approach into the common repertoire of
interaction design may contribute to a more situated sense of designing in
and with the living world around us: it invites into the work ecosystems
within which our bodies are nested (and which we have nested within
us), in order to help cultivate the perception of a relational self which
is deeply invested in our interconnected living systems. By embodying a
relational design research praxis through engaging with more-than-human
actors such as microbes, plants, and water, and following embodied design
methods, I am implicating in my design work the life-body or Flesh of
which we are all a part, and myself in a caring reciprocal and obligatory
relationship with it.
This work aims to contribute to a reframing of how we understand interaction design, a predominantly symbolic and language-oriented discipline, as one which centres bodily movement and sensory appreciation. It
has shifted my own conceptions and experience of my daily service design
practice, in that it has developed my understanding of entanglements
with human and nonhuman stakeholders in any work that I do. It has
driven home the concept that we are in fact made from our relatings with
each other (Haraway, 2016). There is a necessity for interaction design as a
field to encourage the development of body-first sensitivities of researchers and practitioners: rationale for this often centres on designing better
and healthier emerging technologies, but this project has been concerned
with ways in which we may connect with other living bodies and systems
via the soma. In our common assumptions of human exceptionalism, we
often forget how entangled we are with myriad other living systems. Interaction design being concerned with experience, this project has been primarily concerned with shifting experience such that we perceive the truth
of our shared existence. It has been less about doing and creating, than
becoming, being.
This project was developed in an intimate and domestic context, and thus
I cannot claim that it may have far-reaching impacts on others, nor that it
may solve large and systemic problems. adrienne maree brown’s concept of
fractals may serve as a useful concept for considering how this project may
scale; if “how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large” (brown,
2017, p.45), then a small and close praxis such as this may indeed impact
larger paradigms and eventually contribute to a dismantling of human
exceptionalism on a societal scale. However, for now it remains just one
project that has profoundly shifted the worldview and practice of just one
human, and her constituent microbes.
26

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