Abstract
Although intelligent systems are becoming more and more integrated into vital fields like healthcare, defence, and immersive human-machine environments, they are often rejected or not used due to their inability to adapt. These drawbacks can be traced to traditional engineering approaches that disregard the dynamic interactions between human bodies, environments, and changing system functionality and consider cognition as a disembodied process. The aim of this study is to fill this gap by conceptualising a Posthumanist Capability Engineering Framework (PCEF) that combines the ideas of Posthumanism, which broadens design considerations to include technological, environmental, and non-human agencies in human–system assemblages, and Embodied Cognition (EC), which emphasizes the importance of bodily action, environmental context, and sensorimotor experience in thought.
This study employed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to synthesize evidence about the influence of EC on the design of intelligent systems, expert and user questionnaires to highlight practical experiences, and an iterative design process to design and refine the PCEF. The findings suggest that the traditional engineering approaches, requirements, systems and capability engineering do not fully and consistently capture the embodied, contextual and co-evolutionary nature of cognition, thus producing systems that do not fit with natural interactions or contexts. The proposed PCEF offers guidance for systematically embedding EC principles and posthumanist relational thinking into requirements engineering, design and evaluation of systems.
The framework promote the creation of adaptive, user-aligned, and ethically-aware intelligent systems, enabling more symbiotic human–technology relationships. Its contribution are both theoretical advancing the integration of philosophical perspectives into engineering and practical, offering a methodologically grounded approach for designing systems that respect human values while leveraging technological agency. The study lays the foundation for future research and application of posthumanist capability engineering in other and diverse socio-technical contexts.