MANIFESTO · EMBODIED & POETIC INTERACTIONS
Watch someone swipe left on their phone.
For a teenager, it's automatic—muscle memory built from thousands of Instagram stories. The gesture is so internalized she doesn't think about it anymore than she thinks about breathing. It's an extension of her thumb, her attention, her social world.
For her grandmother, the same swipe is deliberate. Careful. She learned it last month when her granddaughter set up WhatsApp for her. Each swipe still carries intention, a conscious thought: This is how I see the next message. Sometimes she swipes right by accident. Sometimes she presses too hard and opens something she didn't mean to.
For a dancer, that same gesture echoes mudras—the hand gestures of Bharatanatyam she's practiced since childhood. Her thumb moves with the same precision she brings to alapadma, the lotus bud. The phone doesn't know this. The designer who created the swipe gesture definitely didn't know this. But for her, every swipe carries that kinesthetic memory, that embodied knowledge of what hands can mean.
One gesture. One designer's intent. Three completely different experiences.
This is the gap we're talking about.
The space between what a designer intends and what a user experiences is not a bug. It's the fundamental condition of interaction.
We—and I say "we" because I've been guilty of this too—harbor a fantasy as designers.
We believe that if we just design it clearly enough, explain it thoroughly enough, make the affordances obvious enough, everyone will understand. Everyone will use it the way we intended. Everyone will have the experience we envisioned.
We create personas. We write user stories. We test with representative users. We iterate until the interface is "intuitive."
But "intuitive" to whom?
The word itself betrays our assumption: that there's a universal human intuition, a shared baseline of understanding that we can design for. That a button that makes sense to a 25-year-old designer in Bangalore will make equal sense to a 60-year-old farmer in Rajasthan, a 15-year-old student in Kerala, a street vendor in Delhi.
This is the hubris of intent. The belief that our meaning can be perfectly transmitted, like a file copied from one computer to another, unchanged and uncorrupted.
But people aren't computers. And meaning isn't data.
Here's what actually happens.
You design an interaction. You embed it with meaning, with intention, with carefully considered choices about color, sound, timing, feedback.
Then someone uses it.
And they bring everything they are to that moment: their language, their culture, their history. Their current mood. Whether they're tired or alert, rushed or relaxed. Whether they've used something similar before. Whether they trust technology or fear it. Whether they learned to read left-to-right or right-to-left. Whether they grew up with screens or are encountering them in adulthood.
They bring their body—its size, its abilities, its limits. The way they hold their phone. Whether they use one hand or two. Whether they can see the small text, hear the subtle sound, feel the haptic buzz.
They bring their expectations, shaped by every other interface they've ever encountered. They bring their assumptions about what things should do. They bring their questions and their confusions and their creative misunderstandings.
And in that moment of interaction, meaning is made.
Not transmitted. Not received. Made.
It's co-created, in the space between your intent as a designer and their experience as a user. And no two people will create exactly the same meaning from the same interaction.
This isn't a failure of design. It's the nature of being human.
There's a reason the same interface feels intuitive to some and baffling to others. There's a reason some interactions feel natural while others feel like learning a foreign language.
Identity is the lens through which we interpret everything.
Consider something as simple as a trash can icon. You click it, and a file disappears.
If you grew up in a culture where waste goes into bins with that particular shape, the metaphor makes instant sense. Your experience of throwing things away maps directly onto the digital action. The icon doesn't just represent deletion—it is deletion, in your understanding.
But what if your experience of waste disposal is different? What if you grew up in a place where organic waste goes to compost, recyclables are sorted into different containers, and the concept of a single "trash" is foreign? The icon still works—you learn the convention—but it doesn't carry the same intuitive weight. There's a translation step, a small cognitive gap.
Multiply this by every interaction, every icon, every gesture.
Your cultural background shapes what metaphors make sense to you. A "desktop" means something different if you've never worked at a desk. A "file folder" resonates differently depending on your experience with physical files.
Your language shapes how you read interfaces. Is your eye drawn to the top left or the top right? Do you scan vertically or horizontally first? Does the menu icon (those three horizontal lines) look like a menu to you, or just three lines?
Your professional training shapes what you notice. A developer sees code patterns. A designer sees visual hierarchy. An accessibility expert immediately notices contrast ratios and keyboard navigation. A security researcher sees vulnerabilities. Same interface, completely different saliences.
Your personal history shapes what triggers you, what delights you, what frustrates you. A notification sound that one person finds pleasantly attention-getting might spike another person's anxiety. The color red might signal danger, celebration, or luck depending on your cultural context.
Your body—its size, its abilities, its current state—shapes what's even possible for you. An interaction designed for two-handed use is inaccessible if you're holding a baby. Small touch targets are impossible if you have large fingers or tremor. Bright color contrast is essential if you have low vision, overwhelming if you're sensitive to light.
There is no neutral user. There is no view from nowhere.
We all interpret through the lens of who we are.
Here's where it gets political.
When we design as if there's a universal user, we're not being neutral. We're centering one particular kind of user and calling it universal.
Usually, it's someone who looks like the designer. Someone from a similar background, with similar abilities, similar assumptions. Often young, urban, educated, technically fluent, able-bodied. Often male. Often from a dominant culture.
Everyone else has to translate. Has to do the cognitive work of mapping their experience onto an interface designed for someone else. Has to code-switch, mentally and sometimes physically, to interact with systems that weren't built with them in mind.
This is exhausting.
And it's exclusionary in ways we often don't see because if we're the centered user, the water we swim in is invisible to us.
The real violence isn't just in making things difficult for some users. It's in pretending we've designed for "everyone" when we've actually designed for "people like us" and called that universal.
It's in treating other ways of understanding, other forms of knowledge, other embodied experiences as deviation from a norm rather than as equally valid ways of being in the world.
The alternative isn't to somehow design for every possible identity—that way lies the madness of infinite personas and an impossible task.
The alternative is to design with humility. To acknowledge that we can't predict all interpretations. To build in space for appropriation, for users to make the interaction their own, to bring their identity to the experience rather than having to leave parts of themselves behind.
Think about the last time you truly learned something—not memorized it, but understood it in a way that stuck.
Chances are, it connected to something you already knew. It fit into your existing framework of understanding. It used a metaphor that made sense to your experience. It resonated with who you are.
Learning isn't neutral absorption of information. It's active meaning-making, and identity shapes every part of that process.
A dancer learning to code might understand loops as choreography—repeated movements with variations. While the music plays, do this sequence. When it stops, exit. The computer science concept of iteration maps onto something she's practiced for years with her body.
A musician learning about neural networks might hear them as layers of an orchestra. Input layer as the string section, hidden layers as harmonies building complexity, output layer as the final chord. The architecture isn't just understood intellectually—it's heard.
A parent learning project management might see it through the lens of coordinating school pickups, meal schedules, and bedtime routines. Dependencies, critical paths, resource allocation—these aren't abstract concepts. They're Tuesday afternoon.
A gardener understanding systems thinking through ecosystems. A cook grasping chemistry through baking. A traveler comprehending cultural systems through the countries they've navigated.
Each brings their identity—their embodied knowledge, their lived experience—to the new concept. And the concept becomes learnable because it connects to who they already are.
This isn't just about using helpful analogies. It's deeper than that.
Identity determines what captures your attention in the first place. What seems relevant. What questions occur to you. What aspects of a complex topic you notice first.
A security researcher learning about blockchain will immediately wonder about attack vectors. An economist will ask about incentive structures. An artist will be drawn to questions of ownership and authorship. A climate activist will want to know about energy consumption.
Same technology. Completely different entry points, because identity shapes what matters to you.
Here's the problem with most educational technology and most technical documentation.
It assumes one path to understanding. One "right" way to learn. Usually, it's the way the teacher learned it, or the way that seems most logical to someone who already understands.
Mathematical concepts explained only through equations. Programming taught only through abstract logic. Design principles communicated only through visual examples.
If that's your learning style, if that matches your identity and experience, great. You're the centered learner, and education works for you.
If not, you have to do double work. You have to first translate from the provided path to your own way of understanding, then learn the concept. You have to build the bridge yourself that should have been built into the teaching.
This is why so many people believe they're "bad at math" or "not technical people." Not because they can't understand the concepts, but because the concepts were only presented through paths that don't connect to their identity, their experience, their way of knowing.
Multiple paths to the same understanding isn't "dumbing down" or compromising rigor. It's recognizing that rigor can be accessed through different doorways.
A truly inclusive learning experience doesn't just tolerate different approaches. It actively provides them. It creates multiple entry points. It uses varied metaphors, examples from different contexts, explanations that connect to different forms of knowledge.
And it leaves space—white space—for learners to build their own connections, to find their own path to understanding, to make the knowledge their own.
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from using technology that doesn't fit who you are.
Not just the frustration of a confusing interface or a feature you can't find. Something deeper: the weariness of having to constantly translate, to code-switch, to suppress parts of yourself to interact with systems that weren't designed for you.
Having to use formal language when your natural communication style is casual. Having to think in linear steps when your mind works in webs and connections. Having to pretend you're at a desk when you're on a train, walking, or curled up on a couch.
Having to act as if you see the world the way the designer assumed everyone sees it.
This is the opposite of growth. This is conformity. Compression. Making yourself smaller to fit into spaces that weren't built for your shape.
Real growth—the kind that makes you more fully yourself, not less—requires interactions that make room for who you are.
Interfaces that adapt to different communication styles rather than enforcing one. Tools that support multiple workflows rather than prescribing a single "best practice." Systems that learn from how you work rather than forcing you to learn their way.
Technologies that invite you to bring your whole self: your language, your culture, your body, your context. That let you work the way that makes sense to you, not the way that made sense to the engineer who built it.
This is what it means to design for the space between intent and experience. To acknowledge that how someone uses your creation might be different from how you imagined, and that's not a failure—it's an opportunity for growth.
Here's something subtle but profound: the tools we use change us.
Not just in the obvious ways—we become faster at texting, better at navigating apps, more fluent in digital interaction patterns.
They change how we think. How we remember. How we relate to the world.
When you start using a camera, you begin to see in frames. The world becomes composed of potential photographs. Your attention shifts to light, to composition, to moments that might translate into images.
When you start using GPS navigation, your spatial memory changes. Some studies suggest it atrophies. But other research shows it might evolve—you remember different things about places, focus on different landmarks, develop different strategies for orientation.
When you interact with social media, your sense of social connection and validation shifts. The like becomes a unit of affirmation. The share becomes a form of identity expression. The algorithm shapes what you see, which shapes what you think about, which shapes who you become.
This is extended cognition in action. The technologies we use aren't just external tools. They become part of our cognitive system, extensions of how we think and perceive and remember.
And through that extension, they shape our identity.
The question isn't whether technology shapes us—it always has, from writing to the printing press to the telephone. The question is: does it shape us toward becoming more fully ourselves, or toward conforming to someone else's vision of who we should be?
Does it support the evolution of our identity in the direction we want to grow? Or does it push us toward a predetermined template of "the user"?
Technology that respects the space between intent and experience allows for the first. It grows with you. It adapts as you change. It supports multiple versions of who you might become, rather than enforcing a single path.
If identity shapes how we interpret and learn, it equally shapes what we create.
Every design choice you make is filtered through your identity. Your assumptions about what's normal, what's important, what's obvious. Your biases about who the user is and what they need. Your blind spots about experiences you've never had.
The tech founder who grew up wealthy designs different affordances around payment than someone who grew up watching their parents choose between bills. The designer who's never experienced discrimination builds different privacy controls than someone who knows what it's like to be surveilled. The engineer who's always been able-bodied creates different accessibility features than someone who navigates the world with a disability.
This isn't a moral failing. It's inevitable.
You can't design from a position you've never occupied. You can listen, you can research, you can empathize—and you should. But your lived experience will always shape what you notice, what solutions occur to you, what problems seem urgent.
The danger comes when we pretend this isn't happening. When we act as if our designs are neutral, objective, universal. When we mistake our particular perspective for the human perspective.
The responsibility is to be aware. To acknowledge that we're designing from a specific identity, with specific blind spots. To actively seek out perspectives different from our own. To build teams with diverse identities who will notice what we miss.
And most importantly, to design with humility.
If you accept that you can't predict all interpretations, can't design for all identities, can't control how meaning is made in the moment of interaction—what then?
You design for openness instead of closure. For invitation instead of prescription. For appropriation instead of dictation.
This is where the poetry comes in.
A good poem doesn't tell you what to think. It presents an image, an experience, a moment—and leaves space for you to make meaning from it. The same poem read by ten people generates ten different resonances, ten different interpretations, all valid.
The poet chooses their words carefully, arranges them with intention, creates a particular experience. But they don't—can't—control what you bring to those words. Your associations, your memories, your emotional state, your cultural context. The meaning emerges in the space between the poet's intent and your experience.
Great poetry depends on that space. The ambiguity isn't a bug. It's the feature that makes the poem rich, that allows it to speak to different people in different ways, that gives it layers you discover on repeated readings.
Interaction design can work the same way.
Instead of trying to make everything explicit, leave room for discovery. Instead of prescribing one workflow, support many. Instead of assuming one metaphor will work for everyone, layer multiple possible interpretations. Instead of filling every moment with instruction, create pauses—white space—where users can breathe and figure things out in their own way.
Design the core interaction with care and intention. But then step back. Trust users to make it their own. To use it in ways you didn't anticipate. To bring their identity to the experience and create meaning you couldn't have designed.
This requires a different kind of design thinking. Not "how can I make this so clear that no one will misunderstand?" but "how can I make this open enough that people can understand it in their own way?"
Not "what's the one right way to do this?" but "what are the multiple ways this might be interpreted, and how can I support that multiplicity?"
Not "how do I eliminate ambiguity?" but "where is productive ambiguity actually valuable?"
The goal isn't perfect communication. It's creating space for meaning-making.
What would it mean to design this way consistently? To make space between intent and experience not an accident but a principle?
It would mean treating design as conversation rather than broadcast. Recognizing that meaning is co-created, not transmitted. Acknowledging users as active meaning-makers, not passive recipients.
It would mean building in flexibility instead of rigidity. Multiple paths instead of one. Adaptability instead of fixed assumptions.
It would mean accepting that people will use your creation in ways you didn't imagine—and designing to enable that rather than prevent it.
It would mean acknowledging your own identity and its limitations. Being transparent about who you designed for and who you might have missed. Inviting feedback from people different from you and actually incorporating it.
It would mean embracing ambiguity as a feature, not a bug. Understanding that what seems unclear to you might be perfectly clear to someone else, and vice versa.
Most of all, it would mean designing with humility. Knowing you can't predict all uses, all interpretations, all meanings. And instead of finding that frustrating, finding it liberating.
Here's what this looks like in practice:
1. Design the center, leave the edges open.
Be clear about core functionality, but don't prescribe every detail of how it's used. Let people adapt it to their context.
2. Multiple paths to the same place.
Support different workflows, different learning styles, different ways of thinking. Don't force everyone through the same door.
3. Reveal gradually, not all at once.
Create space for discovery. Let people learn at their own pace, in their own way. Trust that they'll explore.
4. Make it appropriable.
Can users make it their own? Customize it? Use it in ways you didn't intend? If not, you might be over-prescribing.
5. Embrace productive ambiguity.
Not confusion for its own sake, but openness that allows for multiple interpretations. The kind of ambiguity that invites engagement.
6. Layer meanings.
Like a good poem, create depth. First use reveals one thing. Repeated use reveals more. Different people see different layers.
7. Leave white space.
Not everything needs to be filled. Pauses matter. Silence matters. The space where users breathe and think and make their own meaning.
Return for a moment to that swipe gesture. The teenager, the grandmother, the dancer.
Each experiences it differently. Each brings their identity to that simple interaction. Each makes meaning in their own way.
As designers, we often see this multiplicity as a problem to solve. If only we could design it clearly enough, everyone would understand it the same way.
But what if that's not the goal?
What if the goal is to create interactions rich enough, open enough, human enough that they can hold multiple interpretations? That welcome different ways of knowing, different ways of being?
The space between intent and experience isn't a gap to be closed. It's a gift to be offered.
It's the space where users become co-creators. Where technology adapts to people instead of people adapting to technology. Where interactions can be not just functional, but meaningful—and meaningfully different for each person who encounters them.
It's the space where design becomes poetic.
Not in the sense of flowery or decorative, but in the sense that poetry works: through image and metaphor, through rhythm and resonance, through leaving room for you to bring yourself to the experience and make it your own.
That's the invitation. Not to design perfect, unambiguous, universally understood interactions. But to design interactions that make room for identity, for interpretation, for the beautiful mess of human meaning-making.
To design the space between.