Datafication and Embodied Intelligence: Living as Natural Born Cyborgs

Session Report

Our salon discussion at EPIC centered on an opening provocation: Is technology eroding our embodied intuition, or are we simply becoming the “natural born cyborgs” as Andy Clark suggests we’ve always been? Clark argues that we’ve always outsourced and extended our minds—from using tools like pen and paper to relying on GPS for navigation, and now AI. The anxiety we feel today is about continuing a very human process of extending our intelligence beyond our biological brains.

The Feeling of Datafication

Today, our lives are increasingly defined by the datafication of health, where algorithms mediate our instincts and our well-being is converted into quantifiable metrics. We are simultaneously willing and unwitting subjects of surveillance by governments, companies, and even our own partners and families. This raised the essential question: How does it feel to live through this age where our embodied intelligence is alternately supercharged, surveilled, controlled, and outsourced?

We explored this tension through examples from personal experience:

The Value of Tracking: Participants shared the concrete benefits of technologies like continuous glucose monitors, which immediately connect an action (like eating a certain food) to a physical response, allowing for meaningful adjustments to routines.

Resisting Dependence: On the flip side, several people described their proactive effort to avoid device dependency, choosing to listen to their bodies first, treating their health score as secondary feedback. This showed a strong desire to preserve bodily awareness and intuition when listening to their bodies while using tools that can do the listening for us.

Mutual Care or Surveillance? One participant shared a story of a couple using Oura rings as wedding bands, which highlighted how tracking is entering the realm of mutual care and support. Yet, this instantly opened up concerns about where supportive checking in ends and intrusive surveillance begins.

The Struggle for Agency: The Superflux Lab video, Uninvited Guests, illustrated this loss of agency. The image of a father hiring a boy to “walk” his smart cane to fool the tracking showed how deeply we grasp for free will when technology, even well-intentioned, feels like constant, unwanted critique. This feeling is often tied to the data owner’s motive as it feels different coming from an insurer versus a concerned adult child.

Moving Towards Inclusive and Empowered Futures

The discussion moved toward generative design questions—how do we shape this cyborg future to prioritize human agency?

We asked how designers could learn from tools like financial literacy apps to empower people with health literacy, helping them make informed choices about their data and their bodies. A key challenge to the concept of “somatic offloading” was raised: for many, the issue isn’t deskilling (like forgetting how to read a map), but that they haven’t been skilled in noticing their body’s sensations to begin with. Wearables, in this context, have the potential to skill some users by teaching them to tune into their bodies while creating anxiety and dependence for others.

Our conversation closed with a provocation on inclusive design, emphasizing that we all exist on a continuum of varying abilities. Instead of designing for those living with disabilities, we should design for everyone as ‘temporalily non-disabled’ to account for the inevitability of shifting capacities as we age. This way, one participant argued, we can ensure these tracking technologies are truly helpful, liberating, and respectful of the diverse ways people inhabit their bodies. The open question that remained was: how might researchers design futures that celebrate and preserve the qualitative aspects of embodied life, rather than just seeking to quantify them?

Mushroom Movement: An Embodied Experiment

After the discussion, we invited participants to try a small data experiment inspired by Kristina Höök’s somaesthetic design. Brandy co-designed the experiment in under a week with Claude (Anthropic’s LLM) with coding support from IDEO colleagues Angela Kochoska and Dave Vondle. Working with Claude, Brandy designed a mushroom visualization activated by a small vibration sensor attached to the wearer’s body. The more the wearer gesticulated, the more the mushroom “bloomed.” Participants noted the unexpected pleasure in discovering the sensor simply created blooms, rather than measure or optimize their behaviors. One participant delighted in how generating virtual blooms “isn’t good or bad… it just IS.” As our bodies increasingly become sites for continuous improvement, we explored how AI could also help us reconnect to the art of simply inhabiting and enjoying our bodies. The experiment also served as a call to all ethnographers to try their hand at vibe-coding and collaboration with AI.