[2025]

Making Motion



Making Motion turns bodily gestures into immediate kinetic expression. By animating floating textiles with their hands, visitors shift from watching and consuming to acting and doing. Each movement generates unique patterns revealing how fabric, gravity, and rhythm interact in real-time. Rather than demonstrating pre-scripted sequences, the work values direct engagement where motion emerges through action. Every gesture is preserved as a Kinetic Capture; a golden visualization which extends the performance after the textile is still. 
Today, kinetic (physically moving) design is more prominent than ever, appearing in art, stage design, and interactive installations. These works often rely on complex technical systems, where aesthetics and motion are programmed in advance and presented as polished performances for audiences to watch. While this approach produces striking results, it can also limit opportunities for improvisation, co-creation, and embodied engagement with materials. The challenge, then, is how to open up kinetic expression beyond technical specialists—exploring ways for motion to be shaped directly through human presence, gesture, and interaction.

Making Motion emphasizes hands-on exploration over abstract planning. By inviting audiences to animate textiles through their bodies, the work reclaims motion as participatory and relational, not reserved for technical specialists. Its impact lies in fostering kinaesthetic awareness and showing new approaches for designers to prototype motion experientially, by introducing technology early in explorative making processes. However, the approach also has limitations: embodied experimentation is less predictable and harder to control than pre-programmed systems, and requires more time, sensitivity, and openness from participants. Despite this, the project shows how responsive textiles can enrich environments by enabling collective creativity, highlighting the potential of “doing” as a way of knowing and designing.






Interaction is recorded, producing samples of kinetic design to physically replay at will. 

These samples are frozen with Kinetic Captures: Golden point clouds representing the actual tracking data driving kinetic motion.



Direction & Editing: Marica De Michele, Director of Photography: Jurica Marković, 
Music: Ivna Jurković, Production Assistant: Clara Gustafsson,
Camera work: Kathrine Thude, Model: Kirstine Lund Hansen





Making Motion is exhibited on Dutch Design Week 2025 for Design United







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