Embodied Intelligence in Physical/Digital Worlds

Indigo Weller, Senior Consultant, Stripe Partners
Noémi Cassin, Consultant, Stripe Partners
Cyril Maury, Partner, Stripe Partners

This paper introduces somatic intelligence as a critical lens for examining mobile health design and research. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with somatic psychotherapists and wearable users, we develop the concept of somatic offloading to show how wearables can both support and erode users’ felt bodily experience. In dialogue with interoception science and somatic psychology, we propose design principles that re-center and strengthen users’ capacities for bodily awareness in the age of Generative AI–enabled wearables. Paper

Presenters & Authors

Indigo Weller is a senior consultant and narrative researcher at Stripe Partners with a background in healthcare, medical education and patient advocacy. As a consultant, he draws on his experience working with individuals and caregivers affected by dementia, cancer, and strokes to centre the perspectives and ethical concerns of patients across all phases of the project cycle.

Noémi Cassin is a medical anthropologist and consultant at Stripe Partners. Her research interests centre primarily on the body and explore ideas of agency and phenomenology in the context of chronic health conditions. She holds an MSc in Biosocial Medical Anthropology from University College London.

Cyril Maury is Partner at Stripe Partners and a seasoned strategy-and-innovation leader who helps organisations design new business models for sustained growth. In healthcare, he has led foundational research on haemophilia, Alzheimer’s disease and eating disorders, turning deep patient insight into actionable market strategy. Having lived in Latin America and the Middle East, Cyril thrives on untangling the operational, organisational and cultural complexities of expansion in the Global South.

Carrie Yury, Managing Director, Design and Customer Experience, JPMorgan Chase

What do you do when the system is breaking all around you–when the world is burning, people you love are being demonized, your country is at risk, and your mental health falters? This story of an artist’s 30-day auto-ethnographic diary study shows how a daily drawing practice helped her develop resistance and resilience. Juxtaposing original photographs and drawings, this PechaKucha explores how a practice grounded in the body can help bring us through extraordinarily difficult times. PechaKucha

Presenter & Author

Carrie Yury (she/her) is a design leader, artist, and dedicated EPIC member since 2011. Co-chair of the 2024 EPIC conference in Los Angeles, Carrie has also co-chaired EPIC conference committees, including PechaKucha, salons, and workshops, and has also presented her own work at the conference many times. Carrie is currently a Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase, where she is head of UX Research for Digital. She was born in Southern California and has lived in LA County since 2004.

Ayanda Ndaba, UX Researcher, Design Anthropology

This PechaKucha explores embodied intelligence through the mundane act of waiting in line, a daily reality for many South Africans and one shaped by social, economic, and technological forces. From my ethnographic perspective as a South African, I reveal how the act of waiting exposes deeper cultural truths: the longer the wait, the deeper the inequality. It invites us to reflect on who waits, where they wait, how long we expect them to wait, and who is excluded when innovation overlooks this lived experience. PechaKucha

Presenter & Author

Ayanda Ndaba is a design researcher, founder of Design Anthropology and 2023 EPIC fellow, with five years of expertise in observing and analyzing user behaviour through a blend of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Ayanda takes pride in the observations and conversations they have with people every day that help organizations make informed strategic decisions. Ayanda thrives in research projects that bridge cultural contexts with actionable findings to inform product innovation and market alignment.

Sakari Tamminen, Gemic

As new technologies augment and extend our bodies in astonishing ways, the success of wearable products will depend on their integration with people’s embodied and cultural practices – not just their computational prowess.

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Maria Cury, ReD Associates & Kahyun Sophie Kim, Meta Reality Labs

Hands are central to a new wave of technology – how should we understand and design for them?

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Did you know that hands have bodies, relationships, and minds of their own? As a new wave of technologies focused on our hands emerges, including AR/VR with haptics as a key mode of interaction, we need to design for hands as we would for people. That means ensuring hands can learn, collaborate, and shine. We conducted a study about what gives hands unique value to people in order to understand hand-based skills across contexts and domains of practical expertise. We asked practitioners to record themselves using their hands, analyzed the video footage, and watched the recordings together with each practitioner. We asked practitioners to reflect on their hands and compare how their skills might apply to other contexts. Through this process, we uncovered that the hands have bodies, relationships, and minds of their own. These fundamental observations help us to imagine and anticipate future technology interactions that are not only relevant and useful, but that respect and enable the aspects of our hands that make us feel most human. (Note: The presentation was intended to feature GIFs from fieldwork video, but only still images are allowed per the rules of the PechaKucha format; we therefore storyboarded stills from the recordings as the visuals, to highlight the haptic movements.)