What gestures reveal about users with Dane DeSutter and Stephanie Scopelitis

09/30/2026

What if researchers could learn as much from what people do with their hands as from what they say? Lou talks with Dane DeSutter and Stephanie Scopelitis, authors of the forthcoming Rosenfeld Media book Body Talk: Using Gestures to Rethink Human-Centered Products, about the overlooked role gestures play in research, communication, and design.

Drawing on backgrounds that span learning science, dance, music, and product research, Dane and Stephanie explain how gestures can reveal mental models, clarify ideas that are hard to put into words, and open new opportunities for researchers to dig deeper. Rather than relying on intuition alone, they argue that researchers can learn to observe gestures systematically, and use their own gestures intentionally to support richer interactions.

Through examples ranging from a classroom discussion of justice to an engineer describing data integration, they show how paying closer attention to the body can uncover insights that words alone might miss. The payoff: products that make more sense to the people who use them.

What you’ll learn from this episode

Why gestures offer a window into how people think
How gestures can reveal mental models that words may not capture
How researchers can observe gestures more systematically
Why context and culture matter when interpreting gestures
How gestures can help researchers ask better follow-up questions
How understanding embodied behavior can lead to better product design

Q&A with Dane DeSutter and Stephanie Scopelitis

Q: With so much attention on AI, why write a book about gestures now?

A (Dane): As long as people are the ultimate goal of whatever you’re building, whether it uses AI or a technology we haven’t dreamt up yet, people stay at the center. In the book, we describe the body as a bridge: between the person and the experience, and between the past and the future. No matter what frontier you’re working at, you can go back to the person the product is for and build something better because you understand them fundamentally. In that sense, it’s also a bit of an antidote to the “AI everything” mood in the product world.

A (Stephanie): We use our bodies to communicate, to think through things, and to shape our interactions all the time. We’ve done this organically for centuries. We’re pulling it back out of the bag and saying, “Remember this? The body does a lot.”

Q: Don’t researchers already pay attention to body language?

A (Dane): Researchers are astute. No one would sit in on a usability session and only listen to what people say. But “body language” is just a small piece of a much bigger puzzle. You probably already have an intuition for this. What we show is that you can do it systematically. Gestures can tell you what someone thinks, what they’re clarifying as they communicate with you, and how they’re orchestrating their environment. Those become powerful inputs into the product process.

A (Stephanie): It’s not only about observing gestures. You can also use your own gestures intentionally to move the interaction along. It’s a back and forth: give and take, push and pull.

Q: How are gestures different from sign language?

A (Dane): Sign language is a language, with its own grammar and syntax. Spontaneous gestures work differently. There isn’t one way to gesture an idea, and gestures almost always happen alongside speech. They’re global and synthetic, so you understand them by looking at the context and the words that come with them. Without that combination, it’s hard to know exactly what a gesture means. Yet people read them almost instantly in conversation without having to think about it.

Q: What does noticing a gesture look like in practice?

A (Stephanie): When I taught ethics, I interviewed students one-on-one to understand how they were thinking, and I watched their hands. Two students told me the same thing: “Justice is about fairness.” One made a scale with his hands, which matched his words. The other interlaced his fingers. That was a thinking gesture, and because I noticed it, I asked him to tell me more. He said justice is about how a community interacts to give people what they need. That idea was in his hands before it was in his words. Without the follow-up question, I would have heard another simple answer.

A (Dane): Culture shapes gesture just as it shapes language. When you see a common gesture, it’s worth digging in, because it may not mean quite the same thing to that person. Those are the moments to latch onto.

Q: How can gesture help in product research?

A (Dane): I study data professionals, mostly engineers. You might expect them not to gesture much, but it’s the opposite. So much of their world is imagined. You can’t pick up a database and connect it to a script, so they transact with each other in gesture. I once interviewed an engineer who was building an AI agent. As he talked, he kept plucking his hand out into space and pulling toward a central point. He was showing me that he needed to integrate context from different systems. That told me integration was an important concept, and digging into it opened up a whole discussion about his pain points.

Q: Why are gestures so useful for understanding mental models?

A (Dane): Gestures are excellent for understanding, in fine-grained detail, what someone’s mental model is. Whether a gesture is abstract or more literal, it shows you how a person thinks about something, like how points of information are distributed and pulled together. If you can understand how people think, you can design for them and create products that make sense to them. That’s where the magic is.

A (Stephanie): Gestures also give you an opening to dig deeper. A participant might place an idea in the space between you, showing you the object or action as they imagine it. The richness comes from moving between gesture as a window into the mind, as support for communication, and as a way to direct the interaction. That’s how you and the person you’re talking with get to something you might not have reached otherwise.

About our guests

Dane DeSutter is a learning scientist and UX researcher who studies data professionals and the engineers who build with data systems. His work draws on psychology, spatial cognition, and learning sciences research to understand how people think with and through their bodies. A lifelong pianist, he traces part of his interest in embodiment to performing in solo and ensemble settings.

Stephanie Scopelitis is a learning scientist who studies the role of the body in teaching and learning, especially how explanation and understanding unfold between people. A former professional dancer with the Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance Theater, she went on to study the body in religious practice at divinity school. She has taught ethics and teaches a class in a women’s prison.

Dane and Stephanie are the authors of Body Talk: Using Gestures to Rethink Human-Centered Products.