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Body Talk teaches you to see and use gestures more intentionally, giving you practical guidance to drive human-centered product work. You already use gestures naturally. Everyone does. But most product teams rely too much on what people say—in interviews, meetings, and documents—missing a rich layer of how people think, communicate, and coordinate the world around them through the body.
Who Should Read This Book
Do you talk to users and customers, drive product design or strategy, or facilitate the teams that do? Whether you call yourself a researcher, designer, engineer, or product manager, you've probably got stories of a product or feature that seemed really promising but failed to land. Being unable to read and interpret gestures could be the reason behind that failure. If so, this book is for you.
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.
Takeaways
- Learn how gestures help people think and reveal their mental models.
- See how gestures communicate what words can't capture.
- Learn how the thinking, communicating, and coordinating body work together.
- Discover how to "see" and spot gestures that matter.
- Evaluate and analyze gestures for communication and impact.
- Understand how gestures build belonging in teams and enable richer collaboration and design together.
- Understand the context of gestures by knowing your goals, the relationships at play, and how ideas move through collaboration.
- Prototype and build the right thing together.
- Learn how to analyze and interpret gestures in videos.
- See how AI and software can help you locate movement at scale and make video easier to search.
“The most meaningful innovations come from seeing what others overlook. Body Talk helps product teams move beyond words to better understand human needs, making it an invaluable resource for anyone committed to human-centered design.”
—Nick Smarrelli
Author, The Next Two Steps and Professor, Butler University
“If the precariousness of today’s tech and business environment has you looking for a place to stand, Scopelitis and DeSutter offer a slab of solid bedrock. The timelessness of their message stems from its grounding in human principles that will be relevant as long as people have bodies and interact with each other in the world. (If you don’t think they will or should, this book is probably not for you.) The practical advice they provide is addressed to product development professionals, but it will be useful to anyone who wants to make good stuff with people and for people.”
—Siri Mehus
User Experience Consultant, Bottle Fly Research and Strategy
“In the age of AI, Body Talk is a timely reminder that truly human-centered products still begin with human observation, including the gestures we often overlook. This is a must-read for all experience designers who are navigating the world of designing for humans and machines.”
—Beth Ard
CEO, Customer Thrive Consulting
“Body Talk provides a compelling new lens for human-centered design, showing how gestures reveal the needs, intentions, and insights that words alone often miss. Drawing on decades of research and practical experience, DeSutter and Scopelitis illuminate how the body supports thinking, communication, and collaboration, offering a powerful new approach to understanding people and designing experiences that truly fit human needs.”
—Thérèse Dugan, PhD
Research leader and learning scientist
“Arriving at a time when contextual data is more important than ever, Body Talk is a perspective-shifting resource for researchers, designers, and product teams alike. It brings us back to the most intimate source of meaning: what the body knows before we do.”
—Vera Haussler
Anthropologist and design research lead
“Body Talk makes a compelling case that the body has been the main character all along. By expertly refocusing our understanding of interaction on the gestures and physical behaviors that shape our lives, Scopelitis and DeSutter have created an essential guide for anyone creating immersive experiences, designing embodied technologies or seeking to build truly human-centered products and teams.”
—Michelle Cortese
Design Director of Input and Interaction at Meta Reality Labs, author of Embodying the Machine
“Body Talk starts with advice I’ve seen issued to boards and elite awards juries around physical gesture and its role in communication, and it expands that with concrete frameworks for designing with and for gesture. Kinetic interactions like gesture are one of the modalities of human/device interaction I call out in Design Beyond Devices: as a next step, the authors of Body Talk will help you understand how transformative it is not just to design for gestures, but also to swipe right on gestures as a rich source of human behavioral insight.”
—Cheryl Platz
Author of Design Beyond Devices and The Game Development Strategy Guide