Embodied Intelligence in Physical/Digital Worlds

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Date & Time: Wednesday, September 17, 11:30–13:00 EEST
Location: Lumituuli Auditorium, Dipoli, Aalto University

Overview

Intelligence lives in our bodies, movements, and material encounters with the world, including digital ones. This session shares methods for capturing embodied insights in your research and design practice, helping you recognize and incorporate more multidimensional intelligences in product, service, and research experiences.

Session Leader: Vyjayanthi Vadrevu, CEO, Incluya

Presentations

The Myths, Mess, and Making of Conversational Video AI

Helen Robertson, Senior User Researcher, Motorola Solutions

This paper explores how intelligences are imagined, built, and contested through the development of StoryFile’s conversational video AI – a technology designed to preserve interactive, memory-based representations of people. Using the myth/mess framework as a descriptive and methodological tool, it examines how multiple forms of intelligence – human, machine, corporate, and more – intersect in the making of this technology. Examining both the narratives (myths) and the sociotechnical practices (mess) of AI development, I offer practitioners a lens to understand distributed intelligence as an assembled and relational phenomenon. These insights about the ways AI is shaping memory, identity, and human-machine interactions have significant implications for research and development across industries. Paper

Presenter & Author

Helen Robertson is a digital anthropologist, design strategist, and user researcher based in Nashville, Tennessee. She brings 8 years of experience applying ethnographic and design thinking methods to complex product, service, and organizational challenges across sectors. Helen recently earned a Master’s in Digital Anthropology from University College London, where her thesis explored how conversational video AI technologies like StoryFile shape memory, identity, and human–machine relations.

Somatic Intelligence: How Ethnography Can Support Health Tech to Reengage, not Replace Bodily Awareness in the Age of Generative AI

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 to examine mobile health design and research. Building on interoception research and sensory ethnography, we outline a framework to help researchers elicit and translate somatic data into actionable design principles for re‐engaging users’ capacity for bodily awareness. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with somatic practitioners and wearable users, we develop the concept of somatic offloading to explore how AI integration in health apps can both enhance and erode our felt bodily experience. 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 with a background in consumer insights. Her academic research centres primarily on the body and explores 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.

30 Days of Drawing: Resistance, Resilience, and the Body

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.

Reading Between the Lines of Embodied Intelligences

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.