Body Conscious Design (BCD) is a theory, co-design method, pedagogy, and practice that enables designers and users to transform objects, buildings, and places to serve our physical bodies and change our behavior. 

Contemporary Western culture and design standardize bodies, restrain them in movement and posture, and cause physical pain and deformities. Industrial designs of our clothing, shoes, homes, work places, transportation vessels, and public spaces assume that we are interchangeable parts that can fit into whatever is provided. Shoes are too tight; chairs create back problems; schools, offices, places of entertainment and transportation limit our movements; and even our homes can be restrictive.  

Body Conscious Design makes bodies the starting point. It considers bodies in all their variations—size, shape, ability, cultural conditioning—as an important source of design inspiration, and promotes movement, physical ease, and health. Body Conscious Design helps designers, organizations, and individuals adjust their environments to support bodies first. 

BCD starts with the physical body—its biomechanics—and may also include the senses of sight, sound, scent, texture, humidity. The definition of the body is expanded to include the soma, the body as a lived experience. BCD draws deeply from somatic theory and practices. Somatics are based on human evolution/developmental movement patterns: rolling, crawling, standing, and walking. The somatic aspect of Body Conscious Design includes psyche and social-cultural norms, sometimes called body-mind, sometimes mind-body, sometimes psychophysical.  

Body Conscious Design looks critically at how industrial designs modify the interaction between environments and bodies, and seeks to change those designs. Shoes, clothing, tools, and semi‑fixed features of the near‑environment, especially furniture, may have as much (if not greater) impact on physical well being and social‑psychological comfort than fixed architectural features like walls, doors, windows, and volume that also affect posture, movement, and gaze. Importantly, Body Conscious Design teaches users and designers about the problems standardized designs can create, as well as how to use and create alternative designs for optimal effect.

Galen Cranz began her professorship in the Architecture Department at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975, as a sociologist specializing in a field she created during her PhD work, called the Social Use of Space. In 1978, in order to work with her severe scoliosis, she began taking lessons in and studying the Alexander Technique, “a system of body awareness designed to promote well-being by ensuring minimum effort in maintaining postures and carrying out movements” (Oxford Languages). The Alexander Technique helped her to both manage pain and improve her structural alignment. In 1984 she decided to undertake the three-year teaching certification. The Alexander Technique became more than a form of physical therapy because of the profound psycho-physical, philosophical and spiritual excitement that she experienced in moments of body-mind integration. During this time, Galen came to see that the built environment often does not support the best possible alignment of the physical body and its corresponding psychological well-being. She observed that designers (and indeed academics!) often lack awareness of their own physical bodies, while movement educators and other somatic practitioners do not realize that environments can be changed or do not have the training or skills to change the environment. Body Conscious Design originated as a field of research, on a personal level so that Galen could integrate her research interests in space with her physical need to create the most supportive and pain-free environments possible, and more broadly to bring together the worlds of somatic practices and design, and create a language in which each could communicate with the other.

The first graduate seminar on Body Conscious Design (although not yet titled such) appeared on the UC Berkeley academic calendar in 1984. Students loved it because it located authority within themselves, within their body-minds, rather than in how they imagined others might judge their work. Consciousness became the primary focus of her teaching because consciousness is what the body and mind have in common, and consciousness—whether for good or ill—is embedded in all of the physical products that humans design. Galen continued to teach this course almost annually until her retirement from full time teaching in 2018. 

The Body Conscious Design seminar included exercises for students to explore their bodily awareness and body-mind connection, as well as opportunities to redesign common elements of the built environment: shoes, chairs, workstations, rooms, and indoor and outdoor public spaces. Several students from these seminars have integrated BCD principles into their Masters theses and PhD dissertations in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and other related fields. 

In 1998, Galen published her accumulated research on sitting in The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design (W.W. Norton) which helped her extend the course into a broader movement for Body Conscious Design. She met others from dance, medicine, and organizational development who shared her interest in improving the designed world. Among them were Nelleke Don, Martha Eddy, and Jader Tolja, and together we established the Association for Body Conscious Design (ABCD) in 2008.

Many parts of the built environment directly affect our bodies, from the nearest to the furthest. Shoes, undergarments, clothes, tools, furniture, residential and public spaces, transit vehicles, and urban and regional plans can—and should—be re-evaluated and re-designed according to the principles of Body Conscious Design. 

It is becoming increasingly important to include and involve the “next generation” in the advocacy for Body Conscious Design as a global movement. BCD originated as a hybrid of personal and professional interests; its continuation will be shaped by the core principles the founders have defined, and even more by the unique interests of the researchers, educators, and professionals who make BCD part of their practices. Body Conscious Design has the capacity to touch and effect change in all aspects of social life, including but not limited to designing for all abilities, designing for social justice, and design for environmental sustainability—a determining factor in how long humans get to stay here on planet earth. Our vision for Body Conscious Design can be most effectively fulfilled in and by community, and that includes you.

The Association for Body Conscious Design operates as a dynamic repository for interviews, publications, and other educational resources on Body Conscious Design, as well as a forum for global community-building among educators, researchers, professionals, and practitioners in the fields of architecture, design, planning, engineering, the arts, and somatics.

Do you want to become an ABCD community member? Have you come across a product or are you doing work that you think we should know about? Do you want to learn more about what we’re up to? We want to hear from you!