For Design Indaba’s 25th edition, Global Graduate, French designer and scenographer Sacha Buliard presented her project Unlearn, an interactive mat designed to encourage bodily awareness through movement, touch and play. Her talk blended ideas from performance art, choreography and product design to propose new ways of thinking about wellbeing and embodiment.
Buliard’s talk delivered an intimate and deeply sensory perspective, exploring how design can help people reconnect with their bodies in an increasingly distracted and disembodied world. Roughly the size of a traditional tatami mat and made from ecological foam, Unlearn invites users to engage in a sequence of physical exercises aimed at heightening body consciousness. The mat is embossed with abstract instructions and visual patterns, accompanied by a set of small tactile objects that guide interaction. Buliard explained how the project encourages users to slow down, reorient themselves physically and pay closer attention to sensation, balance and movement in their everyday lives.
The project draws heavily from experimental dance practices, particularly the Contact Improvisation techniques developed by Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith in the 1970s. Inspired by the ways dancers use gravity, momentum and friction to communicate through movement, Buliard shared how she translated these principles into a design object created for wellbeing. The mat’s visual language was also informed by composer John Cage’s Cartridge Music, whose abstract scores encouraged musicians to actively interpret and co-create performances rather than follow rigid instructions.
Buliard’s Design Indaba 2020 talk challenged audiences to reconsider the relationship between body, space and consciousness highlighting the growing intersection between design, mental health and somatic experience.
