ESSAY · EMBODIED & POETIC INTERACTIONS
Open any interface. Any app. Any website.
What's your primary sense? Vision. What guides navigation? Visual hierarchy. What confirms an action? A visual change. What provides feedback? Color, animation, icons—all visual.
Touch is reduced to tapping a glass screen—the same gesture whether you're deleting a photo or sending a message. Sound is an optional notification, easily muted. Smell, taste, temperature, proprioception? Irrelevant. The body is reduced to eyes and a fingertip.
This isn't natural. It's not inevitable. It's a choice—one we've made so consistently that it seems like the only option.
We've organized the senses into a hierarchy. Vision at the top. Touch barely acknowledged. Everything else discarded as "not digital." We've taken the messy, multiplicitous, interconnected field of bodily sensation and forced it into a ranked, ordered system.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze had a name for this kind of organization. He called it the creation of an "organism"—and he argued we should resist it.
Deleuze wasn't writing about interaction design. He was writing in the 1960s-80s, thinking about painting, literature, cinema, and the nature of experience itself. But his ideas cut to the core of how we design for the body.
His central insight: the organized body—the body with hierarchical senses doing predetermined jobs—is not our natural state. It's something imposed on us.
Before organization, there's just intensity. Pure sensation. A field of potential where sight bleeds into sound, where pressure becomes color, where everything is interconnected and alive with possibilities.
Think of a moment of intense experience. Not thinking about something—experiencing it directly. A loud sound doesn't just hit your ears. You feel it in your chest, see it as brightness, taste it as metallic. The senses haven't separated yet. They're one continuous field of affect.
Deleuze called this the "Body without Organs"—not a body lacking organs, but a body before organs get organized into a hierarchy. A body as pure intensity, pure potential, before it gets coded into "this is what eyes do, this is what hands do."
The Body without Organs is what remains when you take away the organization, the hierarchy, the predetermined functions—and discover the raw capacity for sensation underneath.
Deleuze made a crucial distinction most designers miss: sensation is not perception.
Perception is what happens when sensation gets organized, categorized, recognized. You see a red circle, you recognize it as a notification badge. That's perception. The raw redness, the way it hits your nervous system before you know what it means—that's sensation.
Perception is mediated by knowledge, by language, by culture. You perceive a "button" because you've learned what buttons are. Sensation is immediate, pre-linguistic, bodily. The slight resistance when your finger meets the glass. The micro-vibration of haptic feedback. The warmth of the device in your palm.
Most interaction design operates entirely in the realm of perception. We design recognizable things—icons, buttons, menus. We assume users will perceive what things are and what they do.
We rarely design for sensation itself.
Consider a musical instrument. A good one isn't just perceived as an instrument. It creates sensation directly. The resistance of piano keys under your fingers. The vibration of a guitar string traveling through the wood into your body. The breath pressure needed to sustain a note on a flute.
These aren't representations of music. They are the music, at the level of bodily sensation. The instrument doesn't tell you about sound—it makes you feel sound as physical force.
Or think about VR at its best. Not when it's creating a realistic-looking room (perception), but when it creates vertigo (sensation). When your inner ear conflicts with your vision and you feel genuinely unbalanced. When proprioception—your sense of where your body is in space—gets confused and you stumble in the real world.
That's designing for sensation. And it's powerful in ways perception can never be, because it bypasses recognition and hits the nervous system directly.
When we design interfaces, we organize the senses without realizing it.
We decide: vision is for information. Touch is for input. Sound is for alerts. Each sense gets a job, a predetermined function within the system.
Information architecture does this too. We create hierarchies—home pages that branch to category pages that branch to content pages. Tree structures. Top-down organization. Everything in its place.
Deleuze argued this kind of organization is stratification. We take a smooth, continuous field of possibility and carve it into discrete, separated layers. We impose order where there could be flow.
And we lose something in the process.
1. Cross-modal sensation
When senses are organized into separate channels, we can't design for synesthesia—the bleeding of one sense into another. We can't make sound that feels like texture, or color that sounds like rhythm, or touch that suggests smell.
But the body naturally experiences this way. Children do it constantly—describing sounds as "spiky" or colors as "loud." We trained them out of it. We organized their senses.
2. Intensity gradients
In organized systems, things are either on or off, present or absent. A notification exists or doesn't. A button is pressed or not.
But sensation works in gradients, in intensities. The difference between a light touch and a hard press. Between warm and hot. Between quiet and loud.
When we flatten everything to binary states, we lose the richness of analog experience.
3. Becoming
Deleuze was obsessed with "becoming"—the in-between states where something is transforming into something else. Not A or B, but A-becoming-B.
Organized systems hate this. They want discrete states: loading or loaded. Collapsed or expanded. On or off.
But the most interesting sensations happen in transitions. The moment between touching a screen and feeling the haptic response. The gradual warming of a device under your hands. The slow fade of a notification before it disappears.
These becomings are where intensity lives. And organized design typically erases them.
Not organized by sense, but by intensity.
Not hierarchical, but rhizomatic—spreading in all directions at once, with multiple entry points and no single correct path.
Not about recognition and representation, but about direct sensation and affect.
Let me be concrete.
Instead of asking "what does this button do?", ask "what intensity does this interaction create?"
A delete action could be violent—requiring force, creating resistance, giving heavy haptic feedback. Or it could be gentle—a slow fade, a light touch, a whispered confirmation.
The function (deletion) is the same. The sensation—the affect it creates in the body—is completely different.
Current design thinks this is just "personality" or "branding." Deleuzian design recognizes it as fundamental. The intensity is the interaction.
Don't assign each sense a separate job. Let them blur together.
What if visual brightness was literally linked to audio volume? Turning down the screen automatically quiets the sound, not because they're functionally related, but because they're the same intensity expressed through different channels.
What if scrolling had texture? Not just smooth inertia, but varying resistance. Dense text feels heavy to scroll through—the haptics push back. Sparse content feels light, almost floaty. You're not representing the content; you're making it tactile.
What if color temperature actually affected thermal sensors? Warm UI colors trigger gentle heat from the device. Cool blues run slightly colder. The metaphor becomes literal, becomes sensation.
These aren't gimmicks. They're ways of creating sensation that cuts across organized sensory boundaries.
Trees have roots and branches. Clear hierarchies. One trunk, everything else subordinate to it.
Rhizomes spread horizontally. They have no center. Multiple entry points. No hierarchy. Any point connects to any other point.
Most information architecture is arborescent—tree-like. Home page → Category → Subcategory → Content. Linear. Hierarchical.
Rhizomatic navigation would be different. Every page is potentially an entry point. Every connection suggests multiple other connections. No "correct" path through the content.
Wikipedia actually has some rhizomatic qualities. You rarely read it linearly. You follow tangents. Every article links to dozens of others. There's no single entry point, no predetermined order.
But it's still organized by perception (articles about recognized topics) rather than sensation. A truly rhizomatic interface would connect based on affective resonance, not semantic similarity.
What if navigation was driven by how things feel rather than what category they belong to? Browse not by topic but by intensity, by mood, by the quality of attention they demand.
Organized systems try to prevent interference. Each sense channel should be clean, distinct, not disrupting the others.
Deleuzian design embraces interference. When senses interfere with each other, new sensations emerge.
Visual noise that disrupts legibility. Audio that makes the screen harder to see. Haptics that interrupt smooth scrolling.
This sounds like bad UX. And it is, if you think the goal is frictionless perception.
But if the goal is intense sensation? Interference becomes generative. The conflict between channels creates affect. The struggle to perceive through the interference makes you aware of the sensing process itself.
Artists have known this forever. Musicians use dissonance. Painters use clashing colors. Filmmakers use jarring cuts. Not because they don't know the "rules," but because breaking organized harmony creates sensation that harmony can't.
Good design is supposed to be invisible. Transparent. The interface disappears, leaving only the content, the function, the goal.
This is the dream of organized perception. Get the senses to do their jobs so efficiently that users don't even notice them working.
Deleuze would say: this is the dream of total organization. The complete victory of the organism over the body's capacity for sensation.
When an interface resists transparency—when you feel it, when it pushes back, when it refuses to disappear—that's when sensation emerges.
The lag of a slow connection. The weight of a heavy object in VR. The resistance of a physical control. These aren't failures of transparency. They're moments when the medium becomes palpable, when you sense the interaction itself rather than just its function.
Artists working with digital media often emphasize this. Glitch art makes you see the digital as material. Deliberately slow interfaces make you feel time. Heavy, awkward interactions make you aware of your body.
This isn't about making things hard to use. It's about recognizing that the sensation of use—the felt quality of interaction—is valuable in itself, not just a means to an end.
Let me be clear: you can't just throw out all organization. Total deterritorialization—complete destruction of structure—doesn't create freedom. It creates chaos.
Deleuze knew this. He talked about stratification (organization) and destratification (dissolving organization) as a careful dance. You need enough organization to function, but not so much that you kill the capacity for sensation.
Bad Deleuzian design would be: random sensory overload. Everything interfering with everything else. No way to accomplish tasks. Pure intensity with no way to navigate it.
That's not liberating the Body without Organs. That's just sensory assault.
Good Deleuzian design would be: enough structure to orient yourself, enough destratification to feel alive.
Moments of pure perception (yes, this is a button, here's how it works) alongside moments of pure sensation (but pressing it feels like this).
Mostly organized navigation with strategic moments of rhizomatic wandering.
Clear functional affordances with unexpected sensory intensities layered on top.
The goal isn't to destroy usability. It's to recognize that usability—smooth, transparent, organized perception—isn't the only value. Sometimes sensation matters more.
Not every interface needs to be a Deleuzian experiment. Banking apps should probably be transparent and organized. You want to perceive your balance and make transfers without intense bodily sensation getting in the way.
But:
Creative tools benefit from sensation. Drawing, music-making, writing—these are about feeling, not just function. The sensation of use is part of the creative process.
Exploratory interfaces benefit from rhizomatic structure. Discovery is more interesting when the path isn't predetermined. Museums, archives, knowledge bases—let people wander based on felt resonance, not just categorical organization.
Emotional communication benefits from intensity. Messaging someone you love should feel different than messaging a colleague. Not just different visual design—different sensation. Different affect.
Play benefits from destratification. Games are already less organized than productivity tools—they embrace uncertainty, exploration, physical challenge. Push that further. Make the senses bleed together. Create interference. Generate unexpected intensities.
We're designing the sensory environment people live in.
When interfaces are rigidly organized—vision for information, touch for input, everything else irrelevant—we're training bodies to be organized the same way.
We're teaching people to privilege vision, to ignore other senses, to expect transparency, to want frictionless perception.
We're creating organisms, in Deleuze's sense. Bodies whose capacities for sensation have been channeled into predetermined functions.
The alternative isn't chaos. It's recognizing that bodies have more potential than our organized systems allow. That sensation is valuable, not just as a means to perception, but in itself. That intensity, interference, and becoming create experiences that smooth, transparent functionality can't.
What if we designed for the Body without Organs?
Not organizing senses into hierarchies, but creating fields of intensity that move across sensory boundaries.
Not building trees of information, but rhizomes of resonance.
Not pursuing transparency, but creating opacity that makes you feel the medium itself.
Not eliminating interference, but using it to generate sensation.
Not making every interaction smooth and predictable, but introducing moments of becoming, of transformation, of affective surprise.
This is harder to design. It can't be templated or systematized as easily as conventional UX. It requires attention to qualities that don't show up in wireframes or user flows.
But the result would be interfaces that don't just convey information—they create sensation. That don't just let you accomplish tasks—they make you feel alive in the process.
Against the organized senses. For the Body without Organs. For design that creates intensity, not just clarity. For interfaces that make you feel, not just think.
This essay draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's work, particularly A Thousand Plateaus (the plateau "How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?") and Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. For interaction designers wanting to go deeper, also see Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual and Anna Munster's An Aesthesia of Networks.