Dancing, drawing, designing

This paper describes and analyses a drawing practice in a research project on corporeality and gesture, with a view to designing objects and spaces. This research, carried out at the École nationale supérieure d’art et de design de Nancy (France), questions our presence with things and others, the sharing of space and the world, by questioning the gestures that underpin them. Drawing is one of these gestures. Its pedagogical aims are pragmatic and practical: to question our physicality in artistic training and to provide prescriptive elements, i.e. methods and techniques of looking, reading, writing, designing and drawing. Turning away from knowledge that makes the body an object, such as ergonomics, the approach turns towards a knowledge of the self by the subject itself: somatics. The objective of the so-called somatic practices is to better understand and appreciate one’s own body experience in an aesthetic way. They are different from our habits, from our everyday connection to environments and propose to discover the variety of movements offered to our body when making movements. They propose a path towards body awareness that cannot be acquired through theoretical teaching, but only through the practice of movement. The role of the aesthetic appreciation of the body experience and the creativity of somatic practices and more generally of dance allows us to make the hypothesis that they are tools for design research the objective of which is precisely to consider the body in movement in order to conceive objects and spaces differently. To verify this hypothesis, we describe a creative protocol, followed by dance students and design students, which combines dance, drawing and furniture design. The drawing is in turn notation, imprint, sensitive recording, trace of movement, score, memory and quasi-object supporting a morphogenesis. Because it constantly revives movement, the objects resulting from the process are open to gestural and postural invention.