This paper explores strategies for designing interactive spaces that cultivate Einfühlung - an embodied sensitivity to feeling into others’ experiences. While prior work has explored the designer’s embodied role, we focus on how interactive technologies can engage participants’ bodily experience to foster affective and relational resonance. Through a series of research-through-design experiments with the Memory Mechanics installation, a virtual archive of embodied memories, we investigate how spatial, gestural, and affective interactions can evoke bodily resonance. Drawing on these experiences, we identify four key strategies for supporting embodied sensibility and collective reflection. We propose that Einfühlung is not a fixed trait, but an emergent quality shaped through interactive engagement. These strategies offer conceptual tools for designing technologies that foster intimacy, sensitivity, and meaning over control and efficiency in interactive spaces.

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Designing for Einfühlung: Strategies for Embodied Sensitivity in Interactive Spaces

  • Maja Fagerberg Ranten,
  • Mads Hobye,
  • Troels Andreasen,
  • Karen Eide Bøen,
  • Lise Aagaard Knudsen

摘要

This paper explores strategies for designing interactive spaces that cultivate Einfühlung - an embodied sensitivity to feeling into others’ experiences. While prior work has explored the designer’s embodied role, we focus on how interactive technologies can engage participants’ bodily experience to foster affective and relational resonance. Through a series of research-through-design experiments with the Memory Mechanics installation, a virtual archive of embodied memories, we investigate how spatial, gestural, and affective interactions can evoke bodily resonance. Drawing on these experiences, we identify four key strategies for supporting embodied sensibility and collective reflection. We propose that Einfühlung is not a fixed trait, but an emergent quality shaped through interactive engagement. These strategies offer conceptual tools for designing technologies that foster intimacy, sensitivity, and meaning over control and efficiency in interactive spaces.