ep. 97. How an Embodiment Architect Designs for Physical AI
8 min read
Binna Lee is an embodiment architect.
As a design researcher, extended reality (XR) designer, and design educator, her practice centers on building immersive experiences that bridge the gap between our internal, psychological worlds and our external, physical environments.
Binna’s story begins in South Korea, where she developed keen observation skills from a young age. Her parents weren’t always expressive in their facial or body language; emotions often had to be read from more subtle signals.
That early sensitivity deepened through art education.
As Binna trained in observational drawing, the practice of drawing what is in front of you rather than from memory, she learned to study the world with disciplined care: the proportion of a body, the structure of a face, and the way light hits an object.
“Most people only look at an object to recognize it. Drawing forces you to truly observe.”
Binna wasn’t just learning to draw or paint something accurately. She was learning how to see in systems, looking beyond surface appearances into their underlying structures.
This foundation led her to study product and industrial design, before moving to New York City for graduate studies at Parsons. Here, she integrated neuroscience into her toolkit, providing a formal vocabulary for the perceptual and cognitive processes she had practiced since childhood.
For example, she describes translating a three-dimensional phenomenon onto a two-dimensional page as a meticulous sensorimotor experience:
“The brain begins to dissect physical reality: light, shadow, materiality, dimensional perspective, proportion, structure, and movement.”
Binna also found herself applying her observational practice in new ways in daily life, adapting to a new set of cultural norms.
These threads converged into a central inquiry: how invisible inputs like family upbringing, cultural environment, and media exposure shape what a person believes is possible.
Today, Binna teaches design at Parsons School of Design, serves as the Vice Chair of Women in Design NYC, and is developing Insight Realm, an XR experience that translates that inquiry into spatial form.
The Body as the First Interface
Through her design practice, Binna has developed a working research framework: The Body as the First Interface.
Her framework is grounded in scientific research on how biology, psychology, and culture shape us, which she reinterprets through XR, spatial cognition, and design research.
She advocates for a shift away from 2D screen design toward a more embodied experience. Her reasoning is that because humans are three-dimensional, multi-sensory beings, our technology should engage our physical bodies rather than just our eyes.
To illustrate her point, she references literature on how babies develop:
“Cognitive development is grounded in sensorimotor experience, social feedback, and the sense of moving through space that lets us locate ourselves in the world. You don’t get that through a screen.”
Translating theory into practice, Binna designs immersive experiences in which the body is the primary interface for human intelligence, exploring how physical AI and spatial computing can better align with our physical reality.
Her industrial design experience, spending years studying and building three-dimensional objects, directly influences her work. She thinks in terms of weight, texture, material, and fit when designing experiences, making spatial thinking second nature.
The framework is also a kind of homecoming back to her formative observational experiences, where the convergence of visual, spatial, and motor processes served as her first blueprint for what “body-as-an-interface” feels like.
The Perception Box
Another central pillar of Binna’s practice is revealing and dismantling what’s been called the “perception box” in cognitive discourse: the invisible mental framework through which we make sense of reality.
Rather than seeing perception as a purely internal process, Binna argues that it’s continuously shaped in a dynamic loop: we shape our perception of the world, while the world simultaneously shapes our perception of ourselves.
Binna experienced this firsthand when immigrating to the United States. Navigating a new culture required continuously interpreting unfamiliar social cues, body language, and conversational rhythms. Everyday interactions demanded deliberate observation. This experience revealed something fundamental about perception:
“We observe most deeply when our assumptions stop working.”
No longer able to rely on automatic interpretations, she had to consciously reconstruct meaning through the interplay between her body and environment, bringing previously unconscious frameworks of her perception into clear view.
This realization fundamentally shaped her approach to design: Rather than viewing vulnerability as something to avoid, she came to see it as a powerful catalyst for expanding perception. By questioning our own perceptual frameworks, we also become more capable of understanding others’ frameworks.
These learnings directly inform Insight Realm, an XR experience that invites people to explore how their perception box forms: upbringing, school dynamics, and social reinforcement. It then lets people shatter it and rebuild it through a gardening metaphor: planting and tending new perspectives over time, illustrating how rewiring takes repeated practice.
Binna notes that dismantling the perception box is not merely about questioning our assumptions; it’s about recognizing perception as something that can be consciously cultivated.
“By making our invisible frameworks visible, we create the possibility for greater empathy, more thoughtful design, and more intentional relationships with both people and intelligent technologies.”
This practice is increasingly important in an age of digital echo chambers:
“Social media previously amplified our existing perceptual filters. Today’s increasingly personalized AI systems have become another environment that can reinforce—or challenge—the ways we make sense of the world.”
Where AI Fits
I asked Binna about the role of AI tools in her practice.
For visual ideation, she generates images using Adobe Firefly and Google’s Gemini Nano Banana. For 3D work, she uses Meshy AI to turn sketches and images into 3D models, then refines them in Blender, which she drives through Claude over an MCP connection.
Binna views these tools as temporary scaffolding: a stepping stone to quickly bypass technical barriers and manifest ideas in 3D spatial environments.
Relatedly, she sees how AI can play a beneficial role in design education, observing creative expression open up for students who would once have been gated out by tooling complexity:
“The entry point used to require a high bar. Now students can sketch on paper and turn that into a 3D object. The lower entry point means they can focus on what they’re trying to express.”
At the same time, Binna is clear about AI’s limits: Rigging still needs humans. Final asset production benefits from human-in-the-loop refinement. Students still have to know what they want to express. While AI tools can lower the barrier, they cannot replace human spatial design judgment.
Binna also highlighted how her study of human behavior has helped her build intuition about designing to engage and complement our perceptual and cognitive systems. For that reason, she feels it’s important that designers ground themselves in psychology (especially human development!), sociology, and biology to develop a holistic understanding of people.
This is especially urgent for designing AI experiences:
“How are we going to utilize artificial intelligence without knowing ourselves?”
Binna also notes that AI tools share a fundamental challenge: they’re bottlenecked by 2D screen constraints.
Bringing AI Off the Screen
To Binna, AI is not simply another interface. It’s becoming part of the environmental context that shapes our perception, behavior, and routines, in the form of wearables, robots, and ambient technology.
Because of this, its impact will depend on how thoughtfully we architect its integration into the places where people live, work, and connect.
Yet, much of today’s AI design follows patterns inherited from screen-based experiences.
“We’re not thinking deeply enough about the body as an interface—or about how our environments, from furniture to lighting to everyday objects, shape our relationship with AI.”
As an example of physical AI done well, she points to Nome, a domestic robot from creative consultancy Frog, designed to exist in harmony with the user’s home environment.
Binna notes that where and how physical AI exists is just as important as what it can do:
“A robot placed in a living room is experienced differently from the same technology in a workplace because home carries familiarity, emotional attachment, routines, and psychological safety. The surrounding environment becomes part of the interaction itself.”
AI x XR
As an analog to the digital-physical disconnect Binna has observed in AI design, she offered an example from a recent Audi concept she encountered at the Royal College of Art Immersive ACT Symposium.
The car’s dashboard was flat, with no physical controls. All interface elements, like audio, lighting, and navigation, appeared only through AR glasses.
“Looking and interacting with an AR screen disconnected from physical controls? Is that really safe?”
Driving demands immediate cognitive and physical response times. Pulling controls into AR without physical reference points seems more likely to increase cognitive load and reduce situational awareness, rather than the other way around.
Did you know? Automakers such as Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and Volkswagen have started bringing back physical buttons to cars. Motivations include efforts to improve driver safety, improve the user experience, and comply with evolving safety testing programs, like the Euro NCAP guidelines.
Whether you’re building AR glasses or a household robot, the common lesson is that it’s imperative that interaction patterns are designed with embodied and spatial cognition in mind.
The AI Hype Check
I ask every practitioner I interview the same question: is AI overhyped or underhyped?
For Binna, the question itself needs reframing.
‘Over- or under-hyped’ assumes AI is a fixed, narrow conception of a technology that primarily lives on a screen.
“It’s a matter of how willing you are to step outside your current perspective. It’s hard to broaden your thinking past the screen, past typing or voice, into the physical world.”
The question worth asking is what AI becomes once it gets off the screen.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Opinions expressed are solely Binna’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of her employer. Follow Binna on Substack here.
Three Things to Try This Week
Three takeaways from Binna’s practice:
Design for the body, not just the screen. Even within current screen-based products, ask what the user’s body is doing while they interact. Where is their attention? How does their environment shape it? What multimodal inputs could you draw on to help them interact more naturally?
Help open the perception box, both for users and yourself. Instead of designing AI interfaces that simply agree with the user, introduce ‘friction buffers’ or spatial UI alternatives that gently present contrasting viewpoints, nudging the user out of their perception box. For designers, challenge your own existing mental models by intentionally seeking unfamiliar contexts.
Open the door with AI, but walk through it yourself. Remember how Binna helped her students overcome the 3D modeling learning curve with Meshy AI? Apply the same approach in your own work: identify a learning curve AI could shorten for you or your users. Keep in mind, you still need to put in the work to make something good.
Know a practitioner navigating AI in their work who should be featured here? Reach out to hello@sendfull.com
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QRCA Keynote: July 21
I’m excited to be giving the keynote for the Qualitative Research Consultants Association’s Qual Tech Days 2026 conference on July 21.
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✍️ Register for the conference here.
📖 Good Reads
AI at Work: Strategy Matters More Than Tools (BCG): As frontline AI adoption reaches 74%, companies must prioritize strategic clarity and work redesign over simply providing tools to convert individual productivity into measurable business value (hey, I know a book for that).
Apptronik Announces Robot Park (Forbes): By launching a 90,000-square-foot Robot Park data factory to train its AI, Apptronik aims to move the humanoid industry beyond experimental demos toward a commercially deployable workforce with its upcoming Apollo 3 robot.
Encounters between Artificial and Human Intelligences in Early-Stage Innovation Work (Will Notini, Angela Kochoska, Dan Perkel): AI offers speed, but breakthrough innovation requires the productive friction of human research to build the empathy and team intelligence that automation lacks. Sidenote: This paper is also the best explainer of the peril and promise of synthetic users I’ve read.
That’s a wrap 🌯 . More on UX, HCI, and strategy from Sendfull in two weeks!