Pandemic Design: Art, Space, and Embodiment

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered experiences of space and engendered new spatial design tactics. This article discusses DIY pandemic design tactics used by U.S. microbusinesses to reshape embodied experiences of interior retail spaces, in relation to contemporary artworks. Over the course of the pandemic, large corporations developed standardized, mass-produced designs for pandemic wayfinding and interior demarcation. In contrast, many microbusinesses used DIY pandemic design tactics having formal qualities and phenomenological implications that resemble precedents in contemporary art. Although pandemic safety protocols could be seen as a form of social control, this article depicts their visualization in graphics and barriers as acts for reshaping collective space and as endangered forms of local, non-homogenized design.


Introduction
COVID-19 changed our experiences of space.Beginning in early 2020 and continuing through 2021, many individuals worldwide have adopted safety protocols, including wearing masks, reducing gathering sizes, and maintaining distance from other people.To allow regular activities to continue to the utmost extent possible, businesses, institutions, and governments sought to adapt spaces through design interventions.They installed increased ventilation, reduced the amount of furniture and fixtures in any given zone to promote lower occupancy, hung signs indicating rules regarding gathering sizes, and added wayfinding markings to guide users through spaces while maintaining their distance from others.Because of its aerosolized transmission, the virus is more likely to spread indoors than outdoors, so that outdoor behaviors have been comparatively less impeded by pandemic restrictions.Pandemicera design efforts were largely concentrated in interior designs, wayfinding, and navigating the passage from exterior to interior.
Although numerous articles have explored changing spatial design in public and commercial spaces of large cities, such as New York and Los Angeles, most people in the United States experienced COVID-19 in smaller cities and suburban communities. 1Moreover, in contrast to corporate retail establishments, where scale and layouts often already allow for ample distance between bodies, smallscale shops have faced particularly difficult challenges in re-designing access to their spaces for the pandemic.
That the pandemic fundamentally remade our experiences of collectivity is self-evident, but comparatively less attention has been paid to small-scale, everyday design tactics.Microbusinesses are exemplary sites of everyday design tactics that people have used to adapt to COVID-19 conditions; the formal qualities of microbusiness architecture and design are representative of many U.S. inhabitants' day-to-day experiences of the pandemic.Microbusinesses, which we define as non-franchise private businesses with fewer than ten employees, do not typically have standardized store layouts or official graphic collateral from a corporate office.use idiosyncratic design tactics to direct the spatial narratives their customers navigate when entering the establishment and conducting business.Their pandemic design tactics ultimately differ from most corporate pandemic design strategies because of constraints in architectural setting, funding, and hyperlocal politics.
Before proceeding, we want to be explicit about the politics of this analysis.Our reference to design tactics may imply for some readers a resistance to government regulations-where regulations are understood to be strategies imposing spatial power, as in the work of Michel de Certeau, or in terms of Michel Foucault's biopolitics. 3We reject violent tactical responses to COVID-19 restrictionsfor example, aggression toward mask wearers or violent disruptions of school board meetings to spur school re-openings-and we do not intend to cast creative responses to COVID-19 safety restrictions as heroic, nor to romanticize them.Instead, we ask how the COVID-19 pandemic spurred new forms of DIY interior and graphic design tactics, particularly "projects outside of what we commonly consider design, by people other than [those] we commonly consider designers." 4For example, we can think of activities that de Certeau called "making do" or what Saidiya Hartman has described as the "beautiful experiments" of individuals long unrecognized as thinkers or planners because of their race, gender, and/or social status. 5During the pandemic, ambiguous social conventions and changing regulations compelled business owners and employees to police other people's entry into quasi-public commercial spaces, raising new questions about access and equity: Which forms of embodimentfor example, in terms of masking, bodily proximity, and directionality-are permitted entry?In many situations, design tactics take on the role of silent civic discourse about access to quasi-public space.These design tactics thus create a troubled embodiment, spurring new awareness of bodily presence in shared spaces.
In this article, we examine the formal qualities and phenomenological implications of interior design tactics and graphic divisions of space found in three minority-and women-owned microbusinesses in a small, car-centric Southern U.S. city.In contrast to the message-oriented prefabricated social distancing signage issued by governments or pandemic distancing markings sold by corporations, the DIY designs used by these microbusinesses sit within a longer history of aesthetic interventions that have sought to reshape embodied experiences of space.We understand embodiment to implicate the material as well as the social characteristics of bodies, both individual sensorial experiences and modes of "presence and engagement in the world." 6Following Setha Low, we understand embodied space as "the space occupied by the body, and the perception and experience of that space." 7Ross Douthat, "The Extremely Weird Politics of Covid," The New York Times, September 21, 2021.On the distinction between a tactic, "which insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily," and "mak[es] consumers into immigrants in a system too vast to be their own," versus a strategy, which constitutes a productive, technocratic, and "proper" use of space, see Pandemic design tactics inadvertently echo earlier practices in contemporary art that took access to space as their subject.In the 1960s and 1970s, artists challenged art world gatekeeping through physical alterations of museum architectures and graphic interventions that provoked new awareness of embodied experiences of gallery space. 8The COVID-19 pandemic spurred similar questions about access-not within the confines of the art world, but in a much broader sphere of everyday life.DIY pandemic designs end up formally echoing these earlier art practices because they similarly foreground questions of how one should access and share space.In contrast to today's corporate wayfinding markings and mass-produced physical barriers, which express clear directives about intended bodily comportment, DIY pandemic designs offer more ambivalent takes on the potential for spatial design to organize social encounters.That is, corporate pandemic designs are intended to smooth the awkwardness of the pandemic's new demands on our bodies, drawing on decades of corporate atmospherics that instill a sense of forgetting one's body: "Everything is normal." 9In contrast, the often-awkward spatial arrangements and unrefined materiality of DIY pandemic design, and their ambiguous directives about how to navigate spaces, may have the result of making us more aware of our bodies.
Microbusinesses and Pandemic Design Tactics U.S. microbusinesses have used various design tactics to guide visitors through their interior spaces during COVID-19: markings in interior spaces, such as painted or taped lines, squares, and "Xs" on walls or floors, to indicate social distancing norms; graphic demarcations of different zones within an interior space; signs indicating maximum capacity in given spaces; and labels that distinguish between interior and exterior spaces.These graphics mediate the act of looking inside or stepping tentatively into an interior space.People may slow down their movement to intuitively move according to the graphic marks.Graphic indications request or demand that people attend to the density and flow of other bodies in shared interior spaces.These graphics suggest or compel new forms of embodied behavior, guiding people's passage through space more tangibly than could linguistic or lettered signs that state the optimal distance between bodies.
These design tactics provoke people to project or imagine their own embodied presence in a shared space, even before they enter.People look inside an interior space to estimate whether they can enter without exceeding capacity, honing intuitions regarding number and flow.Of course, this act is already a common one for many women, people of color, queer people, and people with disabilities, whose experiences of navigating collective space are often pre-conditioned by the perceived non-neutrality of their bodies. 10But the COVID-19 pandemic has demanded this a priori attentiveness to bodily co-presence from everyone who would enter a collective space.During the pandemic, everyone must consider challenges to accessing shared spaces and must pre-imagine the process of their body entering these spaces.
As ways to signal or communicate COVID-19 regulations on gathering size and density, microbusinesses' pandemic design tactics intuitively relied on principles of interior design and environmental graphic design.Like interior design, pandemic design tactics are enmeshed within a system of interior spatial relationships, scale, materials, acoustics, furniture, color, and light. 11Like environmental graphic design, pandemic design tactics are concerned with signage and wayfinding in and around buildings, although environmental graphic design typically operates at a larger scale than a single microbusiness. 12n the specific case of COVID-19, pandemic design tactics typically combined interior design's focus on expressive, efficient, or meaningful spaces, with environmental graphic design's focus on enabling people to "understand, navigate, and use their surroundings." 13Yet pandemic design tactics were not intended primarily as meaningful expression-like interior design-nor as directives to pass through spaces efficiently-like environmental graphics.In fact, for microbusinesses, a calculated inefficiency may have been the aim.Microbusinesses operating at low sales volumes would seek to draw out people's shopping experiences-and thus the amount they purchase-to the greatest extent possible, within the new guidelines around capacity and spacing. 14And although we might expect pandemic design tactics to communicate ideas of safety, microbusinesses' pandemic spatial narratives lacked the unifying branding aesthetics of corporate interior design.
In the "world of total design" that art historian Hal Foster has decried as a nefarious quality of our "pan-capitalist present," we should attend to pandemic design tactics of these microbusinesses because they are often some of the final places where the Internet's reach has not yet homogenized design. 15These microbusinesses' pandemic design tactics are idiosyncratic and hyperlocal, rooted in constraints of architectural setting, funding, and hyperlocal politics.In contrast to the soaring ceiling heights and bright lighting of most big box stores, many U.S. microbusinesses occupy architectural settings with ceilings between 9 and 15 feet high, meaning smaller scale design tactics are serviceable. 16They often are more dimly lit than big box stores, and their interior arrangements are idiosyncratic rather than planned by a professional visual marketing designer.Whether located in stand-alone buildings or retail plazas (aka strip malls), these microbusinesses often lack the authority or funds to structurally alter their architectural settings.Instead, they use DIY design tactics to direct the spatial narratives that their customers navigate when entering the establishment and conducting business.
To create social distancing signs, guides for queuing and capacity limits, and graphic spatial barriers, microbusinesses with limited funds often use ersatz materials in unexpected ways.In addition, these businesses are constantly adapting to hyperlocal regulations rather than following one-size-fits-all rules from a national corporate office.Such establishments rarely have enough employees to have someone present simply to conduct temperature checks and enforce rules, so microbusinesses are sites where visual cues and homemade markings are especially important for establishing norms of bodily comportment in the COVID-19 era.In microbusinesses, design tactics often delineate modes of bodily comportment that differ from that of larger, corporate spaces.In contrast to the imperative to stand on distancing marks, seen inside big box stores, the small spaces or social cells in microbusinesses are established between markings and barriers.Rather than creating orderly arrays of socially distanced consumers, the ersatz aesthetics and low-budget materiality of these DIY design tactics invite new negotiations among bodies and settings.

Microbusiness Pandemic Design Tactics
Throughout the pandemic, U.S. microbusinesses often have balanced legal demands for signage and capacity limits with the heterogeneous expectations of politically diverse customer bases.The three microbusinesses discussed below adapted design tactics to their location in a small Southern U.S. city with around 125,000 inhabitants, where rates of COVID infection and death remained low (in comparison to U.S. averages, at least) and voter registrations mark a roughly even split between left-and right-wing political commitments. 17Design tactics were thus made to accommodate a range of pandemic behaviors, with some people taking COVID-19 safety precautions quite seriously and others being more cavalier or "resistant" to restrictions-as a form of political expressivity.In the following paragraphs, we describe micro-scale design tactics that propose new arrays of gathered bodies.
Example 1: Outside a small fish shop with a predominantly African American clientele, blue painters' tape forms a line of exes at chest level on an exterior wall (see Figure 1).The shop, which sells raw seafood and prepared meals for pick-up, is located in a small, 75-year-old house in a highly urbanized area of the city, along a commercial corridor that lies near the edge of a low-income African American neighborhood and a mixed-income neighborhood roughly evenly divided between white and black residents.The interior customer space is linear, about five feet by twenty feet, lined with wooden benches, a concrete counter, and plastic buckets filled with ice and fish.Above tiled flooring, the ceiling rises only nine feet or so.Before the pandemic, the space could be occupied by both customers and non-customers during business hours; people would order and stand or sit to wait for fish or meals.The occasional elderly neighbor would stop by to drop off newspapers to wrap the fish, and non-customers would step in for a brief chat.Customers ordering and picking up prepared meals also waited at an outside pick-up window.
During the pandemic, newly placed blue tape "Xs" and benches, positioned in a line along an exterior wall, guided customers toward the pick-up window.The X-shaped markings suggest an orderly line according to state social distancing regulations, but the wall's proximity to a wide, gravel, city alley between buildings provides inchoate space in which people can mill about.The intuitive bodily reaction to wall markings at the edge of an open space is to stand at some distance from the wall-perhaps parallel to the X marks, but at varying distances from the wall.Particularly in chilly winter weather, the shaded benches are less appealing than the opportunity to find a spot even in weak sunlight.Before the pandemic, customers simply could have entered the shop or clustered around the pick-up window, but the blue tape "Xs" choreograph a zigzag pattern or other potential arrays of bodies along the alleyway.These design tactics suggest new forms of sociality, new bodily arrangements in space.
Rather than language or the law, the graphic and spatial design-these blue tape markings-are what shape bodily behavior in the space, creating new flows and formations of bodies, as well as new potential connections and groupings.Before the pandemic, people could have oriented themselves facing the take-out window as they waited.However, the blue Xs gently insist that people spread themselves throughout the alleyway.Minimal aesthetic means extend the shop's zone of sociality out into interstitial urban spaces.
Example 2: At a women-owned independent bookstore and third-wave coffee roaster, blue strips of painters' tape form a passageway between mobile store fixtures.The shop is located in a 100-year-old wooden house in a tree-lined commercial zone behind a strip of big box stores.Set within a transitional zone between a big box and strip mall commercial area and a lower-to middle-income residential neighborhood, the area is predominantly white, with a mix of single-family homes and trailer homes.The shop interior is divided roughly in half between a dimmer, carpeted, shelf-lined book area, to the right as one enters, and a light-filled, bamboo-and vinyl plank-floored coffee area with several cafe tables.
As with the fish shop, spatial design tactics, rather than discursive signage, guide visitors' bodily engagements with the space.During the height of the pandemic, the establishment did, in fact, use signs to indicate social distancing rules, but these signs ultimately acted more as spatial design tactics than discourse.Up four brick porch steps, to the immediate left of the entrance door, half a dozen homemade printed paper signs were taped to the exterior wall.The signs-a mixture of government-formatted posters found on the Internet and homemade designs-were printed on 8½ x 11-inch printer paper and enclosed in plastic sheet protectors.The coverings collected moisture inside and warped the paper as the humidity changed, so that the signs slowly became illegible.Although shoppers were supposed to read the signs on their way in, the vertical succession of papers no longer read as individual graphic directives, but simply became a visual framing device for the doorway.
Inside, the small strips of blue painters' tape on the bamboo floor and the lack of indoor seating suggest that customers continue moving through the space (see Figure 2).Where a scattering of small cafe tables formerly divided the space into a zone for ordering versus a zone for sitting and consuming, the blue floor lines now delineate a meandering path.In addition, as the pandemic has proceeded, people's feet have worn away parts of the tape, leaving gummy marks on the flooring.Although the blue tape clearly is intended to guide customers into state-mandated distancing, the tables and chairs also help to determine people's flow through the space.Ultimately, people stand in the spaces delineated by the tape markings and the transitions between different flooring materials, positioning themselves in the space between tapes rather than on top of each tape strip.
Example 3: A small Asian grocery located in a strip mall filled with microbusinesses has higher-ceilinged architecture that most closely resembles a big box store.However, its pandemic design tactics operate at a much smaller scale than corporate grocery store design strategies.In places where a better funded store might install plexiglass walls or dividers, the grocery had hung clear shower curtains in an L-shape around the front and side of the cash register to segregate air flow in the customer area from the employee work area.These curtains lasted about one year.In early 2021 during the writing of this article, the shower curtains were replaced with clear plexiglass barriers (see Figure 3).Because the shower curtains were rippled, they reflected light.In addition, the exterior door was kept open to increase air flow; thus, the shower curtains were constantly in motion, making it even more difficult to see or hear the person on the other side.With a barrier of clear plexiglass, people often social distance as if the other person is not behind a barrier.However, because the shower curtains made seeing and hearing difficult, customers' natural instinctiveness was to get closer to speak through them.As with the bookstore/coffee roaster example, people's movements through space were influenced more by these visual barriers than by any verbal signage.
In these three cases, we see microbusinesses develop DIY design tactics for negotiating COVID-19 regulations.These non-professional interventions used homemade markings, cheap materials, and provisional visual cues.Rather than following professional interior design guidelines, microbusinesses added graphic markings to their spaces according to intuited perceptions of customer behavior and flow, contingent upon local cultural norms.These design tactics reflect ways that the pandemic has demanded that we reestablish intuitive practices of bodily comportment in shared spaces through constant renegotiation with others-sometimes collaboratively, and sometimes agonistically.
Still, the ways that people move through space are not reducible to consistent six-foot gaps.Our bodies lean toward some surfaces and zones for their openness, tactility, or glow, while others repel our bodies.Is the wall next to where you stand wood, or plate glass?Does standing on a taped mark, or passing from one mark to the next, place a body in a position where the sun shines into one's eyes?Does maneuvering between one X of blue painter's tape and another place one in a shadow?Continued wariness about exposure to the virus means that people do distance themselves, and in these contexts, they do so by orienting their bodies around marks and forms.Customers do not necessarily set their bodies upon these marks but locate themselves in the interstitial spaces carved out by the surface mark and the materiality of wall, window, floor.
One could say about COVID-19 regulations what Richard Sennett has critiqued about modernist urban design: Social distancing and maximum capacity are "all about control and not at all about sensuality." 18But microbusinesses' DIY interior design tactics are sensual re-formulations of space that rely on deployment of inventories, everyday objects, and basic office supplies or hardware store objects to create a design aesthetic-rather than a unifying look imposed by corporate visual merchandising materials.Just as French urbanist Philippe Boudon later explored the lived spatial narratives that inhabitants created within Le Corbusier's architecture, we should be attentive in design studies to the ways that COVID-19 design tactics exhibit qualities of local adaptation, tactility, and processes of decay in ways that are irreducible to a simple legal directive regarding required signage.

Pandemic Design Tactics and Historical Avant-Gardes
Formally, microbusinesses' pandemic design tactics evoke contemporary art's focus on using everyday materials to create graphic and planar interventions, newly focusing on viewers' embodiment and questioning access to interior spaces.In the 1960s, artists sought to undermine the institutional practices that governed the definitions and display of art.This subversion can be perceived as part of a broader, post-1968 questioning of hidebound conventions, and, in the case of the art world, a rejection of traditional gatekeeping functions of institutions, such as major museums.For many artists, this questioning took the form of graphic and architectonic interventions in gallery spaces that sought to rupture the isolation and exclusivity of art world spaces.The artworks used everyday materials, and the graphic and architectonic interventions spurred viewers  to consider how their bodies navigated an art space.For example, we can think of "floor works," such as U.S. artist Carl Andre's late-1960s arrays of bricks or thin metal plates, which delineate geometric arrays or zones on the floor.Viewers are able, physically, to treat such works as a continuation of the floor, or as a decorative architectural insertion.However, they tend to intuitively avoid stepping on them, instead skirting their edges-even when gallery guards do not warn them off.Similarly, artist Antonio Dias's Do It Yourself: Freedom Territory (1968) (see Figure 4) intervened in the phenomenological experience of gallery space.Dias placed grids of vinyl tape markings on gallery floors to demarcate zones of potential liberation.Pandemic design tactics are differently politicized: Dias was imagining a counterpoint to military dictatorship in Brazil, his country of origin, as well as broader 1960s emancipatory politics.Though today's pandemic designs do not assert zones of freedom, but zones of ostensible safety, they share with Dias's work a sense of ambiguous accessibility.
A more illusionistic approach to graphic division of space can be seen in works by the Brazilian collective Equipe 3 (Francisco Iñarra, Lydia Okumura, and Genilson Soares).At the 1973 São Paulo Biennial, they painted visual signals and added objects to suggest walls and barriers that were not there, guiding people's movements through the gallery space (see Figure 5). 19Today's pandemic designs similarly delineate zones of behavior, proposing spaces in which atomized bodies can be organized.However, unlike corporate rope barriers, DIY design tactics often leave open the option of breaking with the suggested order, of resisting the suggested embodiment by simply walking across the taped grid or stripe.
Pandemic-era ambiguity and the conflict between interior and exterior spaces also are visible in a precedent-setting work by U.S. artist Michael Asher: In his 1979 architectural intervention at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Asher removed a swathe of aluminum panels from the exterior facade and installed them inside the museum (see Figure 6). 20Asher's visually weighty aluminum cladding concealed the white walls that normally reflected light from the windows opposite, giving rise to new atmospheric effects where the weathered aluminum absorbed light.In addition, by doubling the exterior cladding inside, opposite a wall of windows, his work visually displaced the corridor outside.
Pandemic-era design similarly blurs the stark material and visual divisions between indoors and outdoors.Interior spaces where people would normally feel enclosed are made to feel more like exterior spaces as doors remain open and people enter and exit at greater distances.New graphic and spatial designs carve out intermediary zones between exterior and interior spaces, with signs calling out instructions for bodily comportment to people well in advance of doorways, and stanchions or chains extending the process of passing from exterior to interior.Visitors to a place of business spend time in an in-between space, with new physical and visual objects that compel them to undertake a new mode of prolonged and indeterminate entry. 21The passage from exterior to interior is divided into multiple ambiguous phases.
A precedent for pandemic plexiglass barriers can be seen in U.S. artist Dan Graham's "pavilions" of steel, clear glass, and two way mirrors, which he has been making since the 1990s.Evoking the architectural barriers of corporate lobbies, airport security checks, and scientific laboratories, these pavilions presage the nowubiquitous plexiglass shields that hang or perch in front of teachers, cashiers, tellers, and other workers who remain in a relatively stationary position while interacting with the public.Another parallel is found in colorful aluminum and plexiglass sculptures of the 1990s and 2000s by British artist Liam Gillick.These works are inspired by late-twentieth century corporate interior design; they serve as spatial partitions in the gallery that suggest the infinitely adaptable layouts of the open office or shopping mall kiosks.In Gillick's words, "I absolutely believe that visual environments change behaviours and the way people act….If some people just stand with their backs to the work and talk to each other, then that's good." 22he ubiquitous plexiglass and metal barriers of today's pandemic designs evoke similar corporate design aesthetics as these artworks by Graham and Gillick. 23resaging COVID design tactics, which use minimal aesthetic means to dramatically transform people's embodied experi- "concerned with the actual experiences in which the beholder encounters the… work." 24However, rather than situating these formal interventions in the space of the art gallery, contemporary pandemic design tactics reshape people's embodied experiences in the spaces of daily activities.As Ole Jensen points out, the pandemic has "exacerbated the awareness to distance between bodies in public spaces, and hence enabled us to 'rethink' or even 'think with' Covid-19"-an observation that affirms Victor Margolin's earlier call for "an expansion of design knowledge from a knowledge of technique, which has been the traditional emphasis of design training, to a knowledge of user experience." 25 Studying pandemic-era design should include not only the intentional, elegant forms of vaccine delivery apparatuses and new supply chain configurations, but the experimental materials and forms that people have used to guide embodied adaptations to a new socio-material reality.
Why link today's pandemic design to post-1960s artworks?In both cases, spatial design and graphic markings assert control over bodily behavior, whether as disruption, critique, or tactical assimilation.Broadly, the mostly white, mostly male, predominantly U.S. contemporary artists referenced, whose work spans the 1960s through the early 2000s, worked within and against conventions of labor and materiality under late capitalism, as in Theodor Adorno's "totally administered world." 26Like Carl Andre's ersatz floor tiling and Antonio Dias's elliptically political insertion of a liberatory zone within the gallery, like Michael Asher's interior remodeling of the pristine gallery space and the minor interventions of Liam Gillick, today's pandemic design tactics similarly alter floors, walls, and moveable architectonic barriers to reshape embodied experiences of movement through space.
From the late 1960s through the early 2000s, artists manipulated art viewers' experiences of the space of the gallery to thematize norms of bodily comportment in relation to modernist architectonic forms.For many women artists and artists of color, already keenly aware of spatial design's effects on the body in collective spaces, the body was not simply implicated in their artworks, but already constitutive of it. 27Works by artists such as Senga Nengudi, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and the Smokehouse Collective foregrounded the relationship of marked bodies to the spaces of the art world, while white male artists were freed by their "neutral" bodies to assume a seemingly objective stance of critique.
During the pandemic, no body is neutral.In addition to the obvious trepidation that everybody may be carrying virus particles that can cause a highly contagious, potentially fatal illness, the emergence of COVID-19 from China gave rise to a pernicious association of the virus with East Asian bodies. 28The vicious pandemicera antipathy toward people whose bodies visibly suggested ethnic origins in East Asia is layered atop the longstanding racialization of space in the United States, where, in George Yancy's words, "Black bodies… become hypermarked against the unmarked spaces of white intelligibility." 29During the pandemic, layered upon existing forms of spatial racism, the intelligibility of "public" spaces was interrupted by demands that people re-interpret all bodies, and by the reconfiguration of embodied reactions to all other beings in shared spaces.Against this backdrop, today's corporate, mass-produced pandemic designs continue to gloss over troubled embodiment in favor of a seamless shopping experience.However, the DIY design tactics of microbusinesses, like works of contemporary art, foreground the strange newness of pandemic configurations of space embodiments.

Concluding Remarks
Our lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic are hyperlocal, both because local infection rates affect our sense of safety and desires to interact with others in collective spaces, and because of varying government recommendations and regulations about behavior in public space.Government restrictions on movement and comportment in public space are relatively unprecedented for many citizens of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and (nominally) democratic (WEIRD) nations.At the same time, many females, nonwhites, and queer individuals have historically been subject to state control over bodily behaviors and freedoms.
For some people, these local regulations regarding building capacity and distancing measures-usually at the level of the state, county, or municipality-are the most tangible expression of government control over their lived bodily experience that they have ever perceived.With microbusinesses often acting as community hubs, or places where communities coalesce, they are uniquely positioned to act as a window into sentiments about the pandemic and collectivity. 30Design tactics, and people's responses to them, offer an indirect measure of these sentiments about the pandemic and collectivity.With pandemic safety restrictions highly politicized and tensions running high, civic discourse about access to quasi-public space has been displaced into design tactics, creating a sort of troubled embodiment by which all people must reconsider their bodily presence in shared space.

Figure 1 Fish
Figure 1 Fish Shop exterior, Castle Street, Wilmington, NC.Photo by author.

Figure 2
Figure 2 Coffee Shop/Bookstore interior, Park Avenue, Wilmington, NC.Photos by author.

Figure 3
Figure 3 Asian Grocery interior, Kerr Avenue, Wilmington, NC.Photo by author.

18
For Sennett, efforts by architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) to remake central Paris lacked "a sense of materials, of textures and surfaces"; Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Social Life of Cities (New York: Norton, 1990), 213.

Figure 6
Figure 6 Michael Asher, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA, June 8-August 12, 1979, viewing west in Bergman gallery during exhibition.Photograph by Tom Van Eynde.Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Library and Archives, © MCA Chicago; Michael Asher Foundation.
Michel de Certeau, On the social constitution of spaces as specifically white, even while white visitors understand them as racially neutral, see GeorgeYancy, Black Bodies, ences, these artworks fulfill what contemporary artist Mel Bochner called "acute awareness of the phenomenology of rooms," or what art historian Michael Fried proposed as a mode of artmaking Figure 6 (continued from previous page) Michael Asher, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA, June 8-August 12, 1979.Left: façade of the Museum of Contemporary Art with panels in place and work in public storage.Right: façade of the Museum of Contemporary Art during exhibition.Photographs by Tom Van Eynde.Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Library and Archives, © MCA Chicago; Michael Asher Foundation.Corrections made November 2023.See: https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_e_00749for the erratum.