Reciprocal Sensing Body Mapping

A visual tool inspired by Indigenous Lenca and Mestizo worldviews that helps designers trace how sensations and feelings emerge and flow through our interactions with objects and environments. Paper under review.

Indigenous Knowledge

Material Research

Design Research

Publication

More-Than-Human

Soma Design

Overview

Publications	Exhibitions
Under review at DRS 2026 (Design Research Society Conference)	Exhibition planned for Spring 2026 at Digital Media Demo Day (Atlanta, GA)

Project Details

My Role: Lead Researcher, Method Developer, Author, Designer
Technologies / Methods: Figma · Procreate · Body Mapping · Autoethnography · Thematic Mapping · Situated Methods
Team: Dr. Michael Nitsche (PI)
Timeline: August 2025 - Ongoing

A pair of hands gently holding a colorful woven Lenca cloth on a wooden table. Next to the hands, a hand-drawn body mapping illustration shows how sensations like warmth, softness, and texture from the cloth travel through the arms and body. Arrows and labels indicate sensory flows and emotional responses, highlighting the cloth as an active co-actor in the embodied experience.

Funded by Digital World & Image Group at Georgia Tech

The Problem

Body maps are visual tools (Cochrane et al., 2022) that allow researchers to capture the complex, non-verbal sensations and emotions of users that are often difficult to articulate (Cochrane et al., 2021; Núñez-Pacheco & Loke, 2014). Conventional body mapping focuses on internal sensations and often treats the body as isolated and self-contained (Spiel 2021). This overlooks how sensory experiences emerge through contact with objects and environments, especially in culturally specific contexts where materials are understood as animate, relational, and expressive. This gap limits how body maps can help design researchers understand embodiment in culturally rooted, material practices.

Composite figure showing a traditional pocillo, the act of drinking coffee, and the resulting body map. Panel A is a close photo of a small brown earthenware clay cup filled with dark liquid (coffee) on a wooden surface. Panel B shows hands holding the cup from above. Panels C and D show a woman with curly hair in a black shirt holding and sipping from the pocillo. Panel E is a body outline with orange spots at both hands marked “contact point,” a green swirl in the stomach, and orange spirals and blue lines at the face and throat labeled “warmth,” and “scent”. Green marks of lines and swirls are shown in the throat and stomach. They are labeled“cluster of liquid/gargle.”

The Solution

Reciprocal Sensing is an expansion of body mapping that draws from Indigenous Lenca knowledge, which understand matter as animate and relational (Tucker, 2010; Joyce, 2024; Weeks & Black, 1992). It expands body mapping to account for culturally specific contexts and ways of knowing.

It invites people to engage with two additional steps to their body map through which they:

link each felt experience to a worldly source
visualize the direction of these sensory flows.

This simple but powerful addition allows body maps to depict a full picture of what agents are involved in the

Design Approach

Three photographs of Honduran cultural artifacts arranged side by side on a white background. Panel A shows a small brown earthenware pocillo made of clay with a single handle. Panel B shows a painted wooden trompo (spinning top) resting on its side with an attached wooden winder and string. Panel C shows a crumpled multicolored woven cloth in magenta, yellow, green, and blue tones.

Reciprocal Sensing was developed through iterative autoethnographic body mapping using Honduran cultural artifacts, including a pocillo (earthenware cup below in figure A), trompo (spinning top in figure B), and Lenca woven cloth (figure C). During these mappings, sensations such as warmth, vibration, tension, and texture emerged not as isolated feelings, but as exchanges between the body and surrounding materials. These interactions reflected Lenca and Mestizo ways of knowing, where sensing is relational, material, and co-created with the environment (Weeks & Black, 1992; Fowler and Card, 2019).

“Lenca people recognize vitality inherent in matter [...] Lenca people insist on the necessity to maintain reciprocity with the spirits that animate nonhuman matter, including geological materials.” (Joyce 2024)

To make these exchanges visible, I researched Lenca and Mestizo material culture and rituals to develop two new elements to conventional body mapping:

identifying material co-actors—objects, textures, forces, or environments that influence sensation, and
drawing directional flows to show how sensation moves between body and material.

Three panels showing the steps of Reciprocal Sensing used to body map the pocillo encounter. The left panel captioned “Setup” shows a standard body map with colored marks on the face, throat, torso, and hands labeled with sensations like tension and bending. The middle panel “Step 1” overlays small drawings of the coffee and pocillo near the silhouette to acknowledge non-human agents. The right panel “Step 2” adds sweeping arrows and smoke-like lines connecting the pocillo and coffee to the hands, mouth, and torso, visualizing the direction and flow of warmth and liquid through the body.

Example of a conventional body map showcasing an encounter with Lenca cloth:

Composite image showing interaction with a brightly colored checkered Lenca cloth and the resulting body map. Panel A (top left) shows two hands gripping a crumpled multicolored cloth on a wooden table. Panel B (bottom left) is a close-up of both thumbs and fingers pinching and stretching the woven fabric. Panel C (right) is a body map outline covered with layered lines and scribbles around the head, neck, chest, and hands, annotated with words such as “soft,” “warmth,” “covered by draping,” and “touching/stretching,” with a small sketch labeled “Lenca cloth” in an attempt to indicate the non-human agent.

Images (A-B) from the experience with a traditional Lenca woven cloth. Sketch C shows the original body map of the engagement with the cloth.

Reciprocal Sensing extension:

A body outline wrapped in red and purple marks along the arms and torso, with annotations like “softness” and “warmth” moving from the hands inward and from the head down to the neck and chest. A sketch of the checkered cloth appears near the hands labeled “Lenca cloth,” with arrows indicating warmth and touch flowing between cloth and body. There is another drawing depicting how the cloth can be used in bandana fashion

The new version of the body map highlights the multiple ways the textile can touch, wrap, or anchor the body.

This approach visualizes sensation as something that travels, spreads, and transforms through contact between human and non-human agents. It treats sensing not as something that happens to the body, but something that is co-produced with the world.

These maps made visible how sensation(such as the warmth of coffee, the vibration of a spinning top, or the drape of a cloth) travel between the body and materials. These uncovered emotional cues, sensory flows, and cultural meanings that can inspire new design directions.

Key Outcomes

This project introduced a culturally situated method for user body mapping that:

Visualized sensation as movement and exchange.
Supported designers recognized and trace material, environmental, and emotional influences during the interaction.
Generated visual maps that serve as reflective prompts, design artifacts, and research data.
Positioned a culturally inspired tool for embodied interaction design, computational design, and sensory ethnography.

Composite figure showing the use of a Honduran trompo and its body map. Panels A–C (top row) depict a hand winding and releasing the spinning top on a wooden surface: first a hand grabbing the winder string a, then pulling it back, then the trompo spinning alone. Panel D (bottom) is a body outline with colored marks along the arms, hands, shoulders, ears, and feet. Text labels include “bending & extending,” “twist/rotation to wind string,” “tension/direction,” “sound of the trompo’s vibration,” and “noise from vibration of trompo on the floor,” indicating how motion, sound, and vibration propagate through the body during play.

The image above shows a conventional Body mapping of playing with a Trompo (spinning top).

A body outline surrounded by an orange wavy aura representing the sound generated between the trompo and ground that is heard by the person. It has labels such as “extend & release hand tension” along the arms. A small red spinning trompo sits on a green line labeled “ground floor,” with arrows linking the body to the trompo, string, and winder, emphasizing the exchange of energy influences by the arm tension.

By following the Reciprocal Sensing extension the trompo map (above) surfaced that sensations came not just from the object itself, but from all its components—the top, string, winder, and even the ground. These co-actors shaped vibration, tension, and sound, revealing that embodied experience is created through a network of materials, not an isolated object.

Impact

The development of Reciprocal Sensing:

Opens new avenues for pluriversal and more-than-human design methods
Offers a way to visualize sensory experiences through culturally situated and ecological ways of knowing
Supports participatory design with communities who have different ways of thinking about embodiment (Indigenous, neurodivergent, heritage craft) so designers can learn from them to prompt design inspirations
Demonstrates how computational design can engage cultural material knowledge beyond aesthetics

Reflection and Futures

Reciprocal Sensing is not a replacement for body mapping, but a cultural and ecological expansion. It can be adapted for other heritage practices, soma design, research on interactive systems, and tangible interfaces.It offers designers a way to trace how sensation is shared between body, materials, and environment. Future directions include applying this method in co-design workshops, material-based storytelling, and interactive system design. I am now applying this method to design a Human–Human Tangible Interface that facilitates intergenerational dialogue amongst Latinx families using culturally grounded computational design.

References

Cochrane, K. A., Leete, M., Campbell, A., & Ahmadpour, N. (2021). Understanding the first-person experience of walking mindfulness meditation facilitated by EEG-modulated interactive soundscape. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21).

Cochrane, K. A., Campbell, A., & Ahmadpour, N. (2022). Body mapping as a tool to support soma-based design reflection. International Journal of Design, 16(2), 33–49.

Fowler, W. R., & Card, J. J. (2019). Material encounters and indigenous transformations in early colonial El Salvador. In C. L. Hofman & F. W. M. Keehnen (Eds.), Material encounters and indigenous transformations in the early colonial Americas: Archaeological case studies (Vol. 9, pp. 197–220). Brill.

Joyce, R. A. (2024). Sites, traces, and materiality: An alchemy of medieval Honduras (1st ed.). Routledge.

Núñez-Pacheco, C., & Loke, L. (2014). Bodymapping and visualization practices for somatic design. Proceedings of the 2014 Design Research Society Conference (DRS ’14).

Spiel, K. (2021). Bodies in Play: Queering and Cripping Game Design. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 28(2), 1–38.

Tucker, C. M. (2010). Changing forests: Collective action, common property, and property rights in La Campa, Honduras. Springer.

Weeks, J. M., & Black, N. J. (1992). Notes on the ethnopharmacology of the Lenca Indians of western Honduras and eastern El Salvador. Mexicon, 14(4), 71–74.

Reciprocal Sensing Body Mapping

Overview

Publications

Exhibitions

Project Details

The Problem

The Solution

Design Approach

Key Outcomes

Impact

Reflection and Futures

References

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