Want to understand users better? Start by reading Body Talk

Words only reveal half of what users want to say. Bodies “talk” too.

If you want to design human-centered products that actually land, you need to know how to read and interpret gestures, body posture, and gaze. That’s exactly why Dane DeSutter and Stephanie Scopelitis wrote Body Talk.

What is Body Talk?

This book dives into the end-to-end product arc with a focus on how attending to gestures, yours and other’s, deepens meaning. Explore the role of the body in enriching foundational research, supporting collaborative ideation, advancing and validating designs, and facilitating technical conversations to ground nascent technology in complex human experiences.

Why should technology and product design care about the body?

Every product you design will be held, reached for, tapped, or carried by a human body. As AI reshapes how we build, the body is the one constant worth designing around. When you lose sight of it, products feel clunky and people abandon them. Designing with the body in mind, leads to technology and products that feel intuitive, reachable, and genuinely human.

What will I take away?

Body Talk will teach you how to:

• Spot the insights that never make it into the transcript
• Deepen the research practices you already use, without new tools or budget
• Build safer, more inclusive and creative team sessions
• Build a research skill AI can’t replace
• Observe, analyze, and apply gestures with the Three Bodies framework

Who is this book for?

If you’re a researcher, designer, leader, educator, healthcare professional, or facilitator whose work depends on understanding people and getting things done with them, this book is for you, too. Pull up a chair and listen to what the body has to say.

Hear Dane and Stephanie in conversation with Lou Rosenfeld

Want to hear more from Dane and Stephanie before diving in? In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review podcast, Dane and Stephanie join Lou to show how paying closer attention to the body can uncover insights that words alone might miss—and ultimately help designers create products that make more sense to the people using them.

About the authors

Dane DeSutter is an embodiment and gesture scientist who has spent over a decade studying how the body externalizes and supports complex cognition and putting those insights to work in product development. He uses spontaneous co-speech gestures to probe the fine details of people’s mental models across domains as varied as spatial reasoning in science, physician-patient dynamics in clinical environments, wearables, developer experience, and human-AI interaction.

Stephanie Scopelitis is an educator, learning scientist, and qualitative researcher. Her life as a professional dancer carried her into a deeper study of human interaction and the body. She has built her work on a fundamental belief: we understand and navigate the world through our bodies. She designs experiences that pull from her life as an artist, educator, and researcher to help people think, create, and solve problems together through deliberate use of gesture and embodied interaction.

Ready to dive in? Order your copy of Body Talk today!