Dean Peters Bodystorming
What Is It
In this physical variant on brainstorming, participants use their body and inexpensive materials or objects to role-play and mimic interaction with a system, product, or experience.
Why Use It
Explore “risky designs” in cardboard and paper, where the investment and exposure to loss is minimal. Develop empathy with end users by walking through all the interactions end users may have with a system.
When to Use It
When the team has a new set of users to consider, a new interface to test, or is working on a physical design to test and demonstrate new ideas.
How to Do It
- Select a desired topic to investigate, such as navigating an office kitchen, a new software product, or an experience like airplane travel.
- Identify a few willing participants and, if desired, audience members to help with the process.
- Locate a room or space and some materials to serve as props (e.g., office chairs as airplane seats or books as monitors).
- Assign each individual a role – not every role has to be a human (e.g., one person could be a technical component of a system). Make sure everyone knows their role and has some idea of the interactions.
- Step through the scenario using props and mimicking each of the touchpoints that users have with a system, product, or experience.
- Participants and audience members should discuss what went well, challenges, issues, and opportunities.
Key Concepts
Embodied Cognition — The principle that physically acting out an interaction surfaces insights the mind misses when reasoning abstractly. Moving through a scenario reveals friction, sequencing errors, and ergonomic constraints that static artifacts hide.
Touchpoint — Each discrete moment a user interacts with the system, product, or service. Bodystorming forces you to enumerate and physically rehearse every touchpoint, exposing gaps in the end-to-end journey.
Risky Design — A concept that is expensive or risky to build but cheap to fake with cardboard and props. Bodystorming lets you stress-test these designs at near-zero cost before any real investment.
Role Assignment — Casting participants as actors in the scenario, including non-human roles like a software component or a database. This makes invisible system behavior tangible and reveals dependencies between actors.
Props as Proxies — Using inexpensive objects (chairs as seats, books as monitors) to stand in for real components. Low-fidelity proxies keep the focus on interaction flow rather than polish, encouraging experimentation.
Service Choreography — The sequenced orchestration of actors, systems, and handoffs across a service. Physically rehearsing it exposes timing problems, dead ends, and ownership gaps that a service blueprint may only imply.
PM Applications
- Pressure-test a new physical or spatial product concept (kiosk, wearable, in-store experience) during a discovery sprint before writing engineering tickets or committing to a build.
- Generate and validate user journey maps by physically walking each touchpoint, then feeding observed friction directly into PRD requirements and acceptance criteria.
- Run a working session before backlog grooming to expose hidden steps and edge cases in a multi-actor workflow, producing better-scoped user stories.
- Build cross-functional empathy in a stakeholder briefing by casting executives or engineers as end users to viscerally demonstrate workflow pain points.
- Explore service design alternatives where humans and systems hand off work, validating the choreography before formalizing it in a service blueprint or process diagram.
- De-risk a roadmap bet on a costly hardware or environment-dependent feature by faking the full interaction in cardboard and capturing failure modes early.
Benefits
- Allows playful and realistic exploration of physical solutions.
Common Pitfalls
- Treating it as improv theater without a defined scenario or capture mechanism, so vivid insights evaporate and never reach the PRD or backlog.
- Over-investing in prop fidelity, which shifts focus to set design instead of interaction flow and defeats the cheap, throwaway intent of the method.
- Casting only product team members and skipping real or representative users, producing an empathy echo chamber that confirms existing assumptions.
- Omitting non-human roles like systems or data, so critical dependencies and handoff failures stay invisible and resurface as defects in development.
- Skipping the structured debrief on what went well, challenges, and opportunities, leaving the team with a fun activity but no prioritized, actionable findings.
- Bodystorming purely digital interfaces with no physical or spatial dimension, where a clickable prototype or wireframe walkthrough would yield faster, cheaper insight.
Combine With
Prototyping Storyboarding
Assets
- PDF: Download
- Markdown Template: template.md
Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| ITK Phase | GENERATE |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Group Size | 6+ people |
| Time Required | 45+ minutes |
| Source | itk.mitre.org |