An Embodied Perspective on UX Design: From Idea to Design - Einzelansicht

In this project, we will explore what role embodiment plays (or can play) in UX design and how we, as researchers, can change design outputs by shifting perspectives. A good example of this is online shopping, where the standard UX task — making a purchase —mismatches the actual user goal of acquiring an item that is pleasant to wear and fits the body. Read our paper:

1. I Felt Like I Need to Fit in Someone Else’s Body - Understanding Body-Centered UX Design for Online Fashion Shopping.
Proc. of ACM CHI ’2026, USA, https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791225

We will explore how to embed understanding of the role of the body as well as emotions, feelings and lived experiences into UX design processes. You will use research and design methods, focusing on embodiment throughout the UCD process for a, topic/problem/product idea of your choice. Creating a design will be a part of exploring the embodied approach rather than the main goal.

We will have two phases in this project:

(1) Explore together what embodiment means for UX design — how our methods and approaches can be extended or changed to focus on embodied perspectives throughout the UCD process.

(2) Apply this to an application context of your choice — we will discuss ideas, and you will conduct research on embodied UX design (either using the methods we discuss, adapting an existing UX method to make it more embodied, or proposing your own approach and topic)

The goal is to work together towards a research publication (e.g., Student Research Competition), so we highly encourage students interested in the overlap of research and UX design to join. You can do either 12 ECTs or 18 ECTs with a respective workload. Presence at project meetings and ability to invest time for work on the project is a mandatory requirement.

Please check requirements for participation and process for checking if you meet these in the description above. Feel free to reach out for more details or with questions or clarifications:  margarita.osipova@uni-weimar.de

Time and place will be announced at the project fair.

Students from HCI Masters and CS4DM: have successfully completed at least one of the following courses offered by our Professorship: ”HCI Theory & Research Methods”, ”Ubiquitous Computing”, or ”HCI Introduction”.

We further expect general interest in HCI research, embodied perspective on design and UX research and design, willingness to work in a team and solve complex research tasks through design. Prototyping skills (lo-fi and hi-fi) as well as Figma knowledge would be beneficial.

We require participating students to have sufficient time to work on the project from April till the end of July (if a break for exams is needed, this extends into August). Project meeting attendance in person is mandatory.

Interested students need to write an email to Margarita to confirm eligibility for participation in the project. If you have not emailed us and do not qualify after the algorithm distribution, you will be automatically unenrolled from the project. Please send E-Mail to margarita.osipova@uni-weimar.de (mention which courses you took, and provide a description of your prior experience in relevant areas, with examples of prior work if applicable)!

M.Sc. Computer Science for Digital Media

M.Sc. Human-Computer Interaction