P02 → The Body as Tool





The Body as Tool

2025
What does it mean to measure the world with your body?

The Body As Tool reimagines the body as our first ruler — a way of sizing, sensing, and creating through movement and intuition rather than fixed units. Through workshops and collective documentation, this exhibition explores how embodied measurement can reconnect us to physical space in a digital age.

Although I took a leadership role in concepting the exhibition, designing the identity and overseeing its implementation this project would not have been possible without the collaboration of my classmates: Kaitlyn Chen, Yuyidan He, Kyeungjin Min, Jumana Motiwala, Isabella Toms, Chava Vietze, Chayse Walker, Cammie Wei, Mingfu Yang, and Letian Zhang.


RoleCreative Direction
Exhibition Design
Graphic Design
Production
Photography
Deliverables Visual Identity
Exhibition Signage
Elevations
Promotional Materials
Documentation

Visual Identity


The identity uses the marking medium of the exhibition, the round sticker, as a modular system for typography. The title wall is then also activated as part of the experiment, asking visitors to take a sticker on the way out and place it on themselves. As the traces of interaction accumulate within, the title wall breaks down, creating an inverse relationship between the evidence left behind by interaction and the language that frames the experimental concept.

The body here is also used in the installation process; the title wall goes up with no level or ruler, just the naked eye, some limbs, and the modular sticker system itself, calling for an alternative approach to the elevation sketches, which forgoes precise measurements for referential objects(the stickers).




Experience


This exhibtition was held during the 2025 Graduate Communication Design Open studios and invited guests to explore what it means to connect with your body as a tool for measuring through several tasks, each with their own color of sticker that asked you use your body to measure and mark the space you were in. The instructions were simple, leaving room for interpretation according to your own notions of measurement, leaving you to truly consider the role of your particular body in the task.



Workshops


The sticker based tasks within the exhibition were first thought of as a series of workshops. Through activating different parts of the body: voice, reach, sight, arms, feet, nails, etc., we each led the class in individual workshops that ground us in our bodies, and our ability to use them to make sense of the world around us and our relational place in it.