Out of Body, Out of Place: Take the Longer Way Home

Anoushka Mann  // Advisor: Sarah Lippmann 

Take the longer way home. 

This thesis explores how design can resist disembodiment in contemporary urban life by reframing the city as a relational interior that emerges through movement, pause, and sensory attention. Across a network in Old City, a sequence of micro-interventions unfolds through a cyclical three-act narrative - sensing, questioning, and being - that guides participants through shifting modes of perception.

Inspired by Debord’s theory of dérive, choreographed urban drifts and atmospheric devices invite tactile discovery, perceptual disruption, and ecological attunement. In doing so, the project reimagines dwelling as an embodied and shared practice enacted across the city’s lived fabric, asking how presence, serendipity, and care might be recovered not by retreating from the city, but by engaging with it more deeply.