Lived Experience as a Basis for Design: A Design Studio Kindergarten Project

Abstract This research is motivated by our belief that artistic practices have a great potential for exchange and so can promote innovations in the creative processes. In particular, we are interested in how the corporeal lived experience can be integrated into the design process and used as a conceptual basis for an architectural design. Within this article, we propose an interdisciplinary approach to architectural design that includes somatic exercises taken from dance, and associated with a phenomenological recollection of the experiences in space. At the same time, in teaching, we recognize the challenge of bringing the design process closer to the secondsemester architecture students of the Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts. The research was carried out as part of a studio project which focused on the design of a kindergarten. We found that the corporeal approach to design helped the students to immerse themselves in the role of the different users, and so relate to the design in an intimate way. Consequently, the designs were surprisingly imaginative and showed a considerable variation in typology.