Vink's paper on bodily entanglements in social systems design makes a case that systems design has neglected the body - that it has operated primarily through cognitive and representational modes, and that a pragmatist turn towards embodiment would open up neglected dimensions of systemic engagement. The argument draws on somatic awareness, the porousness of boundaries between bodies, and the politics of plasticity - the capacity of bodies to be shaped by, and to shape, the social systems they inhabit. It is, in many respects, a compelling position. The body is neglected in systems design, and the pragmatist tradition Vink draws on offers one route towards taking it seriously.
But reading the paper provoked a set of questions that Vink's pragmatist framing - for all that it draws on a tradition (Dewey, Mead, Sullivan, Hill Collins) that has resources for thinking about power, resistance, and the costs of embodied experience - does not itself take up. What happens when the designer's embodied engagement with a system is not reciprocated but rejected? What happens when the system does not want the designer's bodily presence, their reflexivity, their vulnerability - when it problematises, marginalises, or expels the person who attempts this kind of engagement? And what is the cumulative cost, to the designer's body and psyche, of sustained exposure to a system that does not want to be changed? Pragmatism can pose these questions; what it lacks is a specific account of the unconscious mechanisms through which systems lodge their anxiety in the bodies of those who work within them, and of the containing relationships needed to make that experience survivable.
These are not rhetorical questions. They describe the lived experience of design practitioners working in hostile or defended institutional settings, and the systems psychodynamics tradition has been thinking about them - in precise theoretical terms - for decades.
Projective identification is a bodily process
The first thing the psychodynamic tradition adds to Vink's account is an explanation of how the body becomes entangled in systemic processes - not just through sensory engagement or embodied reflexivity, but through projective identification.
As Lawlor and Sher (2021, p. 15) describe it, projective identification is the mechanism by which unwanted internal states are not merely attributed to another but unconsciously lodged in them, such that the recipient begins to feel and act as though they own the projected material. This is not a metaphor. Projective identification is experienced somatically: the consultant or practitioner feels in their body - as anxiety, as nausea, as confusion, as deadness, as rage - what the system cannot think. Bion's (1962) concept of beta elements - the raw, unprocessed emotional material that has not yet been transformed into something thinkable - refers to something that is experienced before it is cognised, in the body before it reaches the mind.
The systems psychodynamic tradition makes this the foundation of its practice. As Lawlor and Sher (2021, p. 8) put it, the practitioner's task includes "interpreting and using the consultant's own feelings, phantasies, impulses and behaviour as indicators of having become not only in but part of the client system". The body is not just a site of the practitioner's own experience; it is a receiving station for the system's unconscious communications.
This reframes Vink's call for embodied awareness. The pragmatist account treats the body as a medium of perception and engagement - the designer's body as a way of knowing the system more richly. The psychodynamic account adds that the body is also a medium of reception - the system knows the designer's body, uses it, deposits material in it. The entanglement is not symmetrical. The designer does not simply choose to engage bodily with the system; the system is already engaging with the designer's body, whether the designer recognises it or not.
Who contains the designer?
This is where Vink's paper, for all its courage, leaves the hardest question unasked. The pragmatist framing assumes a designer with sufficient agency, social capital, and psychological safety to undertake embodied reflexivity - to expose themselves, to mine their own experience, to make themselves vulnerable in the service of systemic insight. But what happens when the designer lacks that safety? What happens when the embodied engagement that the paper calls for is met not with reciprocity but with contempt, avoidance, or rejection?
Bion's (1962) concept of containment is precisely about this. The infant's raw, unthinkable emotional experience needs to be received by a container - typically the mother - who can hold it, transform it (through what Bion calls alpha function), and return it in a form the infant can bear. When containment is available, emotional experience becomes thinkable; when it is not, it remains as beta elements - somatic, unprocessed, acted out rather than thought about.
The parallel to design practice in complex institutional settings is direct. The designer who enters a defended system is immediately exposed to projective identification - they will begin to feel what the system cannot bear to know. If the designer has adequate containment - supervision, a reflective practice community, a theoretical framework for making sense of what they are experiencing - then what they feel can be used as data, as I discussed in the orientation post. If they do not have containment, they are left carrying the system's unbearable affects in their own body, with no way to process them.
My earlier posts on SCÖ addressed aspects of this dynamic - Who Whom? traced how the programme sustained incompatible realities by keeping them in separate registers, and The Service Designer as Abstract Signifier explored how designers become screens for organisational projections. A psychodynamic lens adds the somatic dimension those accounts lacked: what it felt like to be inside that splitting - months of confusion, inadequacy, and increasing invisibility - and what happens in the body of the person who is carrying projections, day after day, without a containing relationship that would make the experience thinkable.
The body keeping the score
The seminar reflection that Vink's paper provoked kept returning to a question: what can the designer's bodily experience - the fatigue, the confusion, the frustration, the sense of being marginalised - actually tell them, and about whom? The phrase "the body keeps the score" - borrowed from van der Kolk's (2014) work on trauma - captures something that the design literature has begun to acknowledge - Akama's (2016) work on invisible social structures, Akama and Tonkinwise's (2023) account of cultural bodies in service, and Yee et al.'s (2024) study of emotional and affective labour in participatory practice all point towards the somatic dimensions of design work - but lacks a framework for interpreting. The somatic responses a designer accumulates over months of working within a system are data, but they are ambiguous data. Some of what the designer feels may originate in the system's unconscious processes - projected anxiety, defended territory, unthinkable material deposited in the nearest available container. But some may reflect the designer's own history, their own relationship to authority, their own patterns of response to institutional stress. And some may be a straightforward response to genuinely poor working conditions, unclear briefs, or organisational dysfunction that requires no psychodynamic explanation at all.
The value of a psychodynamic lens is not that it provides a totalising account of every negative somatic experience - it does not - but that it opens a line of inquiry that design practice has otherwise lacked. If the designer can begin to attend to what their body is registering, and can do so within a framework that distinguishes between what belongs to the self, what belongs to the system, and what belongs to the situation, then bodily awareness becomes a diagnostic resource. It becomes possible to ask not only "what is this system doing to me?" but "what might this system be doing to the people who use its services, who lack even the partial distance that the designer's temporary role provides?" Menzies Lyth's (1960) foundational study of nursing is instructive here: the defensive structures she identified - task fragmentation, depersonalisation of patients, ritualised avoidance of emotional contact - existed to protect nurses from the somatic and psychic impact of sustained proximity to suffering bodies, but they also shaped what patients experienced. The defences were systemic, not individual, and their effects were distributed across every body the system touched.
The implication for Vink's call to embodied practice is that it needs to be extended in two directions. First, the designer's own somatic experience needs containment - supervision, reflective practice, a theoretical framework for sorting signal from noise - if it is to become usable rather than merely overwhelming. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the designer's bodily attunement should be understood not as an end in itself but as a route into understanding the embodied experience of service users, patients, frontline staff, and other stakeholders whose bodies are shaped by the same systemic dynamics but who have far less capacity to step back and reflect on them. Who holds the designer while the designer holds the system, and how does that holding make it possible to attend to the bodies the system is designed to serve? The Tavistock tradition has a well-developed answer to the first question: supervision, reflective practice groups, structured spaces for processing embodied experience. Design practice, for the most part, does not - and the second question, about extending bodily attunement outward towards service users and stakeholders, remains largely unasked.
The politics of self-exposure
There is a further dimension that the psychodynamic tradition illuminates. Vink's paper, as an instance of auto-ethnographic embodied practice, raises the question of who has the social capital to undertake this kind of self-exposure and be received rather than dismissed. Rose (1989) identified a tension in therapeutic self-examination more broadly: the injunction to know oneself, to cultivate awareness and authenticity, can function as what he calls "governing the soul" - a technology of self that serves existing power structures while appearing to challenge them. Ziguras (2004) makes a complementary point: self-care practices are "appealing as long as attention is focused solely on the power that is being 'transcended' while ignoring the more abstract forms of power that are being entered into" (p. 12).
The psychodynamic tradition is alert to this dynamic, though it frames it differently. Armstrong and Rustin (2019) describe how organisations use individual pathology as a defence against systemic insight - the problem is located in the individual (their personality, their mental health, their inability to cope) rather than in the system's defensive arrangements. A designer who attempts Vink's embodied reflexivity and is met with rejection faces a double bind: the system needs someone to carry its projections, but it also needs to disown the material it has projected. The designer who says "I am feeling confused, marginalised, invisible" is providing accurate data about the system, but the system's defensive response is to attribute those feelings to the designer's inadequacy rather than to its own unconscious processes. Of course, sometimes the system might also be right.
This is not a critique of embodied practice - quite the opposite. My own earlier work in the Service Aesthetics series traced how service design shapes experience across sensual, conceptual, and contextual registers, and how the shift towards immaterial practice creates a paradox: the embodied dimensions of what is being designed become simultaneously more important and harder to articulate. My time working at SICS and the somaesthetic interaction design group at Mobile Life in Stockholm gave me direct experience of what cultivated bodily awareness can produce when it is well supported - how slowing down, attending to proprioceptive and interoceptive sensation, and treating the designer's body as a research instrument can surface qualities that cognitive analysis alone would miss. The argument here is that this kind of embodied practice, without a psychodynamic framework for understanding what the body is also being asked to carry in defended institutional settings - and without adequate containment for the practitioner who carries it - risks reproducing the very dynamics it aims to challenge. The designer who exposes themselves without containment is not engaged in emancipatory practice; they run the risk of being used by the system as an uncontained receptacle for its anxiety, or worse, of being pathologised for their efforts. The politics and power relations of self-exposure are complex, and the design community needs to grapple with them if it is to take seriously the embodied dimensions of systemic engagement.
What Vink's paper opens, and what it cannot close
Vink is right that the body matters, and that systems design has neglected it. The pragmatist framing - porous boundaries, plasticity, embodied reflexivity - captures something real about how designers are enmeshed in the systems they work with. But this particular reading of the pragmatist account does not explain why embodied engagement so often meets resistance, rejection, and hostility; it does not account for the asymmetry of the entanglement (the system using the designer's body, not just the other way around); and it does not address the question of what the designer needs in order to sustain this practice over time.
The systems psychodynamics tradition provides the missing dimension: a theory of projective identification that explains how bodies become entangled unconsciously; a concept of containment that specifies what is needed for embodied experience to become thinkable rather than merely suffered; and an institutional practice - supervision, reflective groups, the group relations conference - that demonstrates what it looks like to take seriously the somatic cost of working at the boundary of defended systems.
The question is not whether designers should attend to their bodies. It is whether the design community and the consultancies and organisations employing them are prepared to build the containing structures that would make it safe to do so, and also whether this bodily intraspection can be extended outward towards the bodies of service users and frontline staff, who are also being shaped by the same systemic dynamics but have far less capacity to step back and reflect on them.
References
Akama, Y. (2016). Continuous reconfiguring of invisible social structures. In Designing for Service (pp. 173–190). Bloomsbury.
Akama, Y. & Tonkinwise, C. (2023). Cultural bodies empowered to perform services: a critical perspective. In J. Blomkvist, S. Clatworthy & S. Holmlid (Eds.), The Materials of Service Design. Edward Elgar.
Armstrong, D. & Rustin, M. (2019). Social Defences Against Anxiety: Explorations in a Paradigm. London: Karnac.
Bion, W.R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.
Lawlor, D. & Sher, M. (2021). An Introduction to Systems Psychodynamics. London: Routledge.
Menzies Lyth, I. (1960). A Case Study in the Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety. Human Relations, 13(2), 95–121.
Rose, N. (1989). Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain, and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. London: Penguin.
Vink, J. (2023). Embodied, Everyday Systemic Design - A Pragmatist Perspective. Design Issues, 39(4), 35–47.
Yee, J., Akama, Y., Choi, J.H., Poong, Y.S. & Light, A. (2024). Invisible designing: Emotional and affective labour as designing in participatory practice. Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference.
Ziguras, C. (2004). Self-Care: Embodiment, Personal Autonomy and the Shaping of Health Consciousness. London: Routledge.