Today we spend much of our lives at desktop computers, and somewhere along the way the body at the desk got quietly reduced: a typing hand, a clicking finger, a fixed posture, a regulated gaze. This Master’s thesis calls the figure produced by that reduction the user’s body, and argues that another body – the actual human body, is still there underneath it.

This reduction can be traced in the history of human–computer interaction (HCI), where communication between humans and machines became increasingly mediated and bodily actions were simplified and standardised. While this long-standing split between mind and body in HCI has been widely criticised, few attempts have addressed it specifically within desktop computing.

I take the desktop as my site of intervention. Understanding “desktop” as a graphical interface, a physical machine and a social arrangement, I design interactions through three approaches to explore what the human body can do once it’s no longer treated only as a source of input.

First, I take the desktop interface as my material and examine its deeply embedded, body-related assumptions. Second, I turn to the machine itself and its built-in sensors, approaching them not as system tools but as ways of relating to the computer as a physical object. In the third stage, the two strands converge and the work opens outward, breaking away from the taken-for-granted, single-user setup of desktop computing to consider not one body but many.