The Body Was Never Asked AND The Body Is the Cost¶
Situated Design is a course that asks you to look at the world not from a distance but from inside it. Over the course of the semester, we moved through Barcelona, not as tourists but as readers of space and system. We visited the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and stood in front of machines with more computational power than most countries possess, watching data move at a scale the human body cannot intuitively grasp. We cycled through the agricultural lands surrounding Barcelona Airport, stopping to make whistles out of clay and earth in a small workshop, then continuing through fields where the construction of the airport complex has measurably altered the local ecosystem and microclimate. We walked to the Semaphore Viewpoint at the Llobregat Delta, a 19th-century building that once controlled maritime traffic through flags and optical telegraphs, now a ruin used by birds, standing three metres above sea level as a barrier against the tide. We studied Exarchia, the Athenian neighbourhood where anarchist collectives and refugee communities have built parallel systems of survival and solidarity, currently under threat from government raids and advancing gentrification. And we read Ozziline Mercedes, whose text Strippers Solitude sits at the centre of this essay.
What connects all of these encounters, what the course kept returning to in different forms, is a single question: who designs the systems that bodies move through, and who pays the cost of those systems with their flesh?
Ozziline writes about developing Metatarsalgia, the ball of the foot becoming painful and inflamed, as a direct consequence of eight hours as Mercedes. Not eight hours as herself. Eight hours as the character she constructed to survive and profit within a specific economic system. That distinction matters because it names something the course kept surfacing in different registers: the gap between the body that a system needs and the body that actually exists. Mercedes needs Ozziline’s body to perform. The body itself needs rest, healing, and the simple right to exist without being useful. These two needs are structurally incompatible, and the system has no mechanism for resolving that incompatibility. It only has a mechanism for continuing.
“My pain is her optimisation.” That sentence carries the entire logic of situated design inside it. It describes what happens when a body is not the subject of a system but its resource. The body speaks constantly, through inflammation, exhaustion, raw skin, weak ankles, and the system receives none of it as meaningful information. It receives it only as a scheduling problem. Rest until you can perform again. Recover in time for the next shift. The body is the cost of the operation, not its beneficiary.
What I kept thinking about as I read Ozziline was how precisely this dynamic appeared in every site we visited during the course, just at different scales and in different registers. At the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, the machines we stood in front of were built to process information at a speed and volume that makes the individual human body irrelevant to the calculation. The infrastructure was extraordinary. The question of whose bodies built it, maintain it, and are made redundant by it was not on the tour. At the Llobregat Delta, the Semaphore building once housed carabineros officers who, due to their proximity to stagnant delta waters, contracted malaria in significant numbers. The building was designed to control the coastline. The bodies that staffed it were the operational cost of that control, expendable enough that their illness was recorded as incidental rather than systemic. The airport complex we cycled past has altered the local microclimate and ecosystem in ways that will outlast every human decision-maker involved in its construction. The land and the non-human life it supported were never consulted. They were the cost.
Exarchia complicates this picture in a useful way. What makes Exarchia distinct is that it represents an attempt, imperfect, contested, under constant pressure, to build systems that actually account for the bodies inside them. The squats, the collective kitchens, the mutual aid networks: these are design responses to the question of what happens when the state’s systems treat certain bodies as costs rather than subjects. The government’s response, raids, gentrification, the slow erosion of the neighbourhood’s character, confirms exactly what Ozziline’s text suggests: systems do not reform in response to the suffering of the bodies they process. They absorb pressure and continue.
Mercedes is not Ozziline. That is the thing Ozziline’s text keeps insisting on and that I find most useful for thinking through the course’s central question. Mercedes is a construction, an optimised persona built specifically for the conditions of a particular economic space. Ozziline built her, inhabits her, and is simultaneously damaged by her. The solitude she describes between shifts is not rest in any ordinary sense. It is engineered recovery, the deliberate emptying of herself so that Mercedes can refill her again. “I spend most of my days in a dissociative state of delusion, preserving my clarity and strength for her hours of activity.” She is not living in those hours. She is being stored.
This is what situated design kept asking me to see: that the spaces and systems we move through are never neutral. They are produced by and for specific interests, and the bodies that do not align with those interests are accommodated only insofar as their accommodation serves the system’s continuation. The agricultural fields around the airport were not redesigned for the birds and insects whose habitat the runway displaced. The carabineros were not relocated away from the malaria risk. The governments targeting Exarchia are not asking what the residents need. And Mercedes does not ask Ozziline if she is ready for the next shift. The schedule continues regardless.
What Ozziline’s text adds to this that the other course subjects do not is interiority. She writes from inside the system, from inside the split between the body that performs and the body that pays. That position, inside, paying, still going, is where situated design does its most important work. Not from outside the system, describing it analytically, but from within it, where the inflammation is real and the next shift is already scheduled and the question of whether any of this was ever truly chosen has become impossible to answer cleanly.
The body is the cost. It has always been the cost. The only question the course kept returning to, and the only question worth asking, is whether we are designing systems that know that, and whether knowing it changes anything at all.