Dancing with Design: Some Insights from the Perspective of Human 
Evolution on the relationship between the Body, Gesture, the 
Unconscious and Design 
 
Design: Body: Sense 
Annual Conference, Design History Society 
University of Kingston 
Surrey 
U.K. 
5 ? 7 September 2007 
 
It is an ordinary day. You are leaving the house. You reach out 
for the keys on the hook in the hall and walk out, closing the door 
behind you. These actions are familiar, automatic. You take the usual 
walk to the shops, thinking about what you might buy for supper and 
where you might buy it. Walking demands little or no conscious effort, 
and your surroundings pass largely unnoticed until, suddenly, you 
see a space, where a building has just been demolished. You take in 
the unfamiliar view. Still walking, you take out your mobile phone and 
ring a friend to suggest a visit. The friend needs a little persuasion. 
You persuade, gesturing as you do so at your unseen - and unseeing 
telephone correspondent. You put the phone away. A little further on, 
across the street, you notice two people talking animatedly to one 
another. You can see them quite clearly, but you are too far away 
actually to hear what they are saying. Even so, you ?read? their body 
language, and you can tell ? or think you can tell - that they are 
having a row, or an affair, or sharing a joke. You shop and go home. 
Later that day, you drive to your friend?s. You arrive, having followed 
your usual route, unaware of the precise sequence of gear changes, 
turns of the steering wheel, pressure applied to brake and other 
pedals that got you there. On your arrival, after greetings, you settle 
into a familiar armchair while your friend makes you both a cup of tea, 
reaching for the tea, the kettle, the tap, and the teapot, all in their 
familiar places. It is an ordinary day. 
In ordinary life, our unconscious brains are fairly constantly at 
work. With regard to our bodies, they seem to take care of two types 
of involuntary actions: practical activities, such as instructing our 
bodies to reach for the keys, or the phone, or the kettle, to walk, 
change gear, or settle into a chair; or expressive actions, such the 
gestures which may accompany speech, gestures which are so 
unrgent, that we can?t help but make them. If challenged after our 
phone call, we would acknowledge that, of course, they were unseen 
by the friend for whom they were ? unconsciously ? intended, but that 
would not stop us doing the same the next time. These two types of 
unconscious bodily movement ? practical and expressive ? overlap. 
Which of us has not sat at a caf? in the street and persuaded 
ourselves that a walk is revealing of character ? an understanding 
which is meat and drink to an actor. Gesture and body language can 
be reliable indicators of mood, temperament and intention.  
According to the psychologist, Jeffrey Gray, most unconscious 
physical actions might be thought of as ?goal? directed. He writes: ?We 
are unaware?of how we undertake actions, other than by way of 
percepts of the goals to which the actions are directed [such as 
becoming conscious that we have picked the keys up].?
i
 Interestingly, 
he cites experimental evidence which shows that the speed at which 
a tennis player reaches for, makes contact with and returns a tennis 
ball, means that the entire action is accomplished unconsciously, and 
that the brain only constructs the conscious narrative of the event 
moments after the action has been completed.
ii
 
At this conference, we are considering the relationship of design 
to the body and the senses. I should like to develop a few 
observations with regard to the relationship between our unconscious 
and conscious uses of our bodies and our designed environments of 
spaces and artefacts. In doing so, I will be drawing on two types of 
evidence. I have spent the past few years trying to work out just how 
much design in human life remains to this day, in part, a function of 
our shared, evolved history as a species. Purely co-incidentally, at 
about the same time, I have been learning how to dance ? most 
recently, the Argentinian tango. Taken together, both the formal 
research and the dancing have fundamentally changed my 
conception of how design ?works?, and in this paper, I will be referring 
to both to illustrate, support and qualify my argument. 
It is noticeable when learning a new figure in dancing that, at 
first, not only may it look difficult to follow and understand, it also 
requires great, conscious, concentration. One observes others doing 
it; one imitates ? however clumsily at first. With each repetition, 
however, the move become easier, somehow, more ?naturalised?, 
internalised. The brain, body and senses (the sensorimotor system, if 
you prefer) learn, and as they learn, the move lodges somewhere in 
the brain (or should that be brain and body? ? I think it should), such 
that it can eventually be ?replayed? with ease. Surprisingly, it is 
eventually perfectly possible to execute complex moves while 
sustaining a conversation with one?s partner (though in truth, the most 
satisfying dancing rarely includes such an unnecessary addition). 
How can this happen?  
Part of the answer rests with the evolved, modular structure of 
our brains;
iii
 where different parts process different types data. This 
understanding helps explain some commonplaces of the ways in 
which we physically ? and unconsciously ? engage with and 
negotiate our physical environments. As in the ?ordinary day? cited at 
the outset, there are countless occasions when our engagement with 
the designed environment is real, but at the unconscious level, only 
breaking into consciousness when the desired percept is delivered 
(keys grasped) or something goes wrong, or is not as expected. 
Much design today lives as image; doubtless many novel designs will 
have lives as virtual entities, but designs intended to enhance lives 
here and now in the physical world need, of necessity, to be 
satisfying at many different levels, including, I suggest, at this 
unconscious one. Such usually unobtrusive designs can contribute 
much to the ordinary pleasure of living. In the visual and emerging 
virtual ages, I hope we may come to value once more the finger plate 
on door which is to be pushed, cueing exactly the right, unconscious, 
goal orientated, physical action. 
As noted, involuntary, unconscious gesture is usually an 
accurate expression of mood or intention. Perhaps our ability 
accurately and rapidly to ?read? such gestures is but one example of 
how finely adapted we are towards the successful negotiation of our 
social environment, that is, we have evolved reliably to detect who 
might be an ally, who an enemy, who, perhaps a sexual partner, and 
who will be of no consequence to us at all. Does this affect our 
interaction with the things we design and live with? I think it has. I 
propose that we possess parallel abilities both to express and 
interpret socially valuable, adaptive data ? rooted in gesture ? 
through the devising and appraisal of artefacts. 
Of course, gesture and body language do not have to be 
involuntary. They can also be a quite deliberate, self-conscious 
performance, of which dance is just one example. Dance is a human 
universal. Merlin Donald, in a study sketching the origins of both our 
minds and of language wrote that ?Mimetic action,? ? by which he 
means ?mimetic? as in ?mime?, rather than ?meme? ?  ?is basically a 
talent for using the whole body as a communication device.?
iv
 The 
tango which I dance may, in part, have emerged among the men 
waiting their turn in the brothels of Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth 
and early twentieth centuries,
v
 and been subject to any number of 
contingent developments since then. To that extent, my dancing is 
the end product of (in terms of evolutionary time) near-contemporary, 
cultural and other contingent factors; but mimesis, including both the 
involuntary gesture and the deliberate performance such as dance, 
plus the ability to interpret it, is probably very old indeed. Like Donald, 
Chris Knight (in company with Michael Studdart-Kennedy and James 
Hurford) believes that gesture and the use of the body to 
communicate is actually older than language itself. He writes: 
 
We are justified in regarding mimesis?as a unitary mode of 
representation, peculiar to our species, not only because it 
emerges naturally, independent of and dissociable from 
language in deaf and aphasic humans unable to speak, but also 
because it still forms the basis of expressive arts such as dance, 
theatre and ritual display. The dissociability of mimesis from 
language also justifies the assumption that it evolved as an 
independent mode before language came into existence.
vi
 
 
Though others place mimesis?s emergence alongside, rather than 
before that of spoken language,
vii
 all are agreed on its antiquity, 
ubiquity and adaptive importance. 
 How does this affect design? For hundreds of thousands of 
years, the ancestors from whom we are descended ? and whose 
genetic make-up we, in part, inherit ? created artefacts using their 
hands and simple tools. In the evolutionary environment, all effort 
expended should be thought of as a ?cost? to be offset against some 
adaptive advantage with regard to survival, reproduction, or both.
viii
 In 
such circumstances, efficiency is adaptive and will be selected for. 
Hand working skills are physical, involve the body, and are acquired 
through emulation and repetition. They may take time to learn and, in 
that sense, are ?costly?. Hundreds of thousands of tools for various 
practical purposes survive from pre-history, as well as 
representational carvings or cave paintings which superficially 
resemble our modern notions of ?art?. In addition to the time spent 
foraging for materials and making these artefacts, how were these 
costs of ?skills acquired?  justified?  
Most obviously, the tools were useful. A flint blade may have 
helped in hunting, in the preparation of food or skins, or otherwise 
been of practical value, helping offset the costs. Similarly, having 
noted the usefulness of what might be mistaken for useless art 
among modern hunter-gatherers,
ix
 one may also legitimately 
speculate on the potential ?utility? of carvings or cave paintings as 
repositories, say, of wisdom about the recognising and hunting of 
game,
x
 or the recording or augmenting of narratives, myths or rituals 
useful to the group in terms of identity and social cohesion. If these 
reinforce the will to survive and reproduce, then there should be 
corresponding increases in effectiveness in the securing of 
resources.
xi
These fairly obvious adaptive advantages may have 
offset costs.  
Need one look further? I think one must. It is worth noting that 
among our own species especially, and like many of our practical 
devices today, useful objects commonly have degrees of finish, levels 
of care taken over their form and structure, or additional work devoted 
to ornament or decoration that use alone cannot justify. Not only 
would this have taken more time to execute, the artefacts may well 
have been the result of skills practiced and deployed to levels which 
making it ?useful? alone might warrant. Both tools and ?artworks? 
appear, even to many modern eyes, attractive, and sometimes 
breathtakingly beautiful. No accident, surely? 
Indeed, no. All artefacts throughout human history ? including 
pre-history ? have the potential to serve as aids to social orientation. 
When made by hand, an artefact will, to some extent literally, 
physically embody the characteristics of the maker: there may be 
evidence of intelligence, of skill, of knowledge of resources, or of 
conventions, of inventiveness, of wit, humour and so forth ? or 
indeed, of the lack of these, or of their opposites. This data can be 
thought of as tacit social intelligence. In part, these qualities can be 
detected through the appraisal of, for example, the delicate, regular 
traces of a sequence of carefully calculated, repeated blows on the 
surface of a flint blade, or the strokes of ochre or other colourings 
which make up the animated representations of the teeming wildlife 
or apparently mythical figures in the cave paintings. All prehistoric, 
hand-made artefacts were, inevitably, records of gesture, and I 
suggest that whatever other adaptive value they may have had, and 
at whatever other levels they may have ?worked?, those which bore 
reliable traces of human gesture ? in a manner akin to the generation 
and interpretation of gesture itself ? provided tangible accounts of the 
character of their creators. And just as we are attuned to interpreting 
gesture, body language or dance, I suggest these traces of human 
action were similarly susceptible to appraisal, with corresponding, 
potentially adaptive benefits in terms of successfully negotiating one?s 
social environment. 
Sometimes evidence of those qualities may be the accidental 
by-product of an individual striving to achieve a practical, economic 
outcome, a bit like noticing how someone reaches for the keys. The 
data is unintended, but more or less reliable, and susceptible to 
detection. And, just as on the dance floor, where in principle at least, 
a tango couple are only interested in entertaining each other with the 
skill and invention of their brief, shared, spontaneous drama, but 
where such ?private? dancing is easily codified, formalised and 
perhaps exaggerated to become a spectacle for the benefit of others, 
so too, sometimes, and more commonly, perhaps, the creators of 
artefacts may have deliberately striven for the effects thought to 
exhibit favoured human qualities. So, for example, rather than being a 
by-product of effective making, regularity may also be sought for its 
own sake, creating the pattern which others may value. 
Further, as I have argued elsewhere,
xii
 an artefact?s power to 
act as an embodiment of tacit social intelligence does not disappear, 
once it becomes remote from its creator (or its creator remote from it). 
On the contrary, as artefacts change hands (or the creators of cave 
paintings die), those who subsequently choose to be associated with 
the artefact are, whatever else they may be doing, choosing to be 
associated with the human qualities the artefact is judged both to 
embody and express. Thus the artefact may serve to articulate any 
number of social ? or sexual ? relationships, and enhance the ability 
of the individual successfully to negotiate their social environment.  
So much for human pre-history. Does this speculative account 
of the remote past, if true, have consequences for design today? I 
believe it does. Put simply, I suggest that each of us has inherited 
and is possessed of sophisticated, adaptive, neural equipment, 
refined over the hundreds of thousands of years of our ancestors? 
devising (designing, if you like), making and appraising hand made 
artefacts in order to facilitate social relationships. The value or 
manner of working of this equipment ? while it operates today in a 
much changed environment ? has not suddenly been wiped out, 
negated or fundamentally altered by the recent advent of complex 
machinery and computer-aided design and manufacture (CADCAM), 
let alone modern society and all that follows in its wake. In 
evolutionary terms, these developments have been with us for half 
the blink of an eye ? far too recent to have had much impact on our 
genetic make-up. On the contrary, while any number of contingent 
cultural causes may affect the detail of how designs emerge out of 
any particular context, and irrespective of the fact that many of 
today?s artefacts actually involve little or no hand work in their 
manufacture, I suggest that, on average, those designs in which the 
style of the lines, shapes or forms  - physical records of ?gesture?, if 
you like ? corresponds to those which, if the object were hand- made, 
might reveal attractive human characteristics, tend to be 
commonplace and favoured, while those that do not are rare.
xiii
 
Finally, some caveats: this is only one of the evolutionary roots 
of our aesthetic preferences. Other include: preferences which 
emerged out of a still more ancient ability successfully to discriminate 
in the organic world between that which is sound, and so potentially 
good to eat, or to have sex with, or more likely to attack, rather than 
that which is rotten, sick, or dying; or another derived from the 
aesthetics of economy, that is, we find attractive the achievement of 
greatest effect by the minimum of means; or a further one ? often 
linked with sexual selection (that is, the accumulated effect of what it 
is that reproductive sexual partners value in one another) emerges 
from extravagance as an indicator of genetic fitness, in that more 
resources than are strictly necessary have been secured and 
displayed (a practice which equates neatly with aspects of Thorstein 
Veblen?s account in his Theory of the Leisure Class of beauty and 
luxury among the East Coast wealthy of late 19
th
 century America). 
These then, in this account, represent the ancient, rich evolved, 
architecture of our contemporary selves, in which the recent, 
culturally contingent factors we are more accustomed to consider, 
play themselves out. Only if this wider perspective is more fully 
appreciated will we have anything approaching a full understanding of 
the workings of design among us today. 
 
 
                                            
i
 Gray, p. 91 
                                                                                                                                  
ii
 In improvised dance, too, it is common to find oneself in the middle of 
spontaneous moves one has little conscious sense of having commissioned. 
Gray, pp. 7-9 
iii
 Fodor, etc.. 
iv
 Donald, M., Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of 
culture and cognition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991; the 
quote from Donald in this extract is from Donald, M., ?Pr?cis of ?Origins of the 
modern mind?, Behavioural and Brain Sciences 16, 1994, pp. 737-91; cited by 
Kohn, M., As We Know it, Granta Books, London, 1999 p. 192 
v
 See, for example the account given by Christine Denniston, author of Dancing 
Tango ? Unlocking the Mysteries, in her short article ?Clich?s of Tango: Origins of 
the Dance? at http://www.history-of-tango.com/tango-origins.html accessed 15 
Aug 2007 
vi
 Knight, C., Studdert-Kennedy, M., and Hurford, J. R., ?Language: a Darwinian 
Adaptation?? in The Evolutionary Emergence of Language, Cambridge University 
Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 8-9  
vii
 Note of all those who disagree from chapter 4 
viii
 Short note about natural and sexual selection; reference to PhD ch6 
ix
 Scalise Sugiyama studied 600 stories told by the Apache, Crow, Selknam, and 
Yanomamo peoples of North America. Each group is geographically and 
culturally distinct from one another, so their stories have been created 
independently, rather being the products of cultural transmission. On the basis of 
this evidence, Sugiyama suggests that contemporary ?hunter-gatherers use 
narrative as a conduit of subsistence-related information?, that is, information 
about the securing of food and other resources. I suggest cave paintings may 
have supported similarly useful data. Sugiyama., S., ?Food for Thought: The Role 
of Narrative in Human Subsistence?, paper delivered at the Human Behaviour 
and Evolution Society Annual Meeting, Amherst College, Mass., 07.06.00 ? 
11.06.00; abstract accessed at 
http://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/fea/arch/hbes2ss.html on 22 Jan 2004 
 
x
 Note about relative value of hunting to foraging ? Kohn? 
xi
 Put in note referring to the passages in PhD dealing with this ? including the 
evolutionary lit crit. The archaeologist, Steven Mithen suggests such distinctions 
are unhelpful. Reflecting on the many elaborate designs incorporated in Upper 
Palaeolithic tools, Mithen writes:
 
?Indeed, it is very difficult to draw any distinction 
between what is a piece of ?art? and what is a ?tool?, and such artefacts epitomize 
the absence of any boundaries between different types of activity.? Mithen, S., 
The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science, Thames & 
Hudson, London, 1996, pp. 48-49 
xii
 Note citing PhD and Delft paper 
xiii