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Embodied design is a proactive educational research program that promotes and investigates humans’ universal capacity to understand STEM concepts. The program’s empirical work is centered on design-based research projects that contribute theory to the Learning Sciences through the practice of building, implementing, and evaluating experimental pedagogical architectures that inform instructional practice. Using both historical and emerging technologies, embodied-design activities are typically two-stepped: (1) draw on students’ evolutionary inclination for purposeful sensorimotor engagement with the natural environment; and only then (2) introduce heritage symbolic artifacts that students initially adopt to enhance the enactment, evaluation, or explanation of their intuitive judgments and actions, yet, in so doing, find themselves adopting normative disciplinary forms, language, representations, and solution procedures. Embodied-design researchers apply mixed methods — from ethnomethodological conversation analysis through to multimodal learning analytics and cross-Recurrent Quantification Analysis — in analyzing empirical data of learning process, including records of students’ motor actions, sensory behavior, and multimodal utterance in conversation with peers and instructors. Several decades of projects across numerous mathematical content domains have increasingly implicated perception — a hypothetical Psychology construct believed to govern sensorimotor and cognitive behavior — as pivotal in explaining students’ capacity to first solve challenging motor-control coordination problems and then bridge through to discursive articulation of their movement strategy. As they attempt to operate the educational technology according to an unknown interaction regimen, new information patterns, e.g., an imaginary line connecting their hands, come forth spontaneously into students’ perceptual experience as their cognitive means of managing the enactment of the activity’s targeted movement forms. These emergent, proto-mathematical, multimodal, dynamical ontologies are then languaged and entified into consciousness, grounding the meaning of conceptual terminology and procedural routines. The embodied-design framework has been applied in building technologies for students of intersectional diversity, including populations of minoritized epistemic — linguistic practices and atypical neural, cognitive, and sensorial capacity.