Over the years the performance of the personal computer has had some radical changes. However, the way we use and interact with them has changed remarkably little. Also the role they play in our everyday lives has not changed much. To escape this, a variety of alternatives have been explored in the research community. A vast number of examples can be given of projects that implement the computer in the world we operate, which can be referred to as ‘tangible computing’. The ubiquitous computing model, proposed by Mark Weiser by the start of the 1990s, distributes computation throughout the environment and embeds computational power in all sorts of objects. There are a few common issues that can be seen across a range of cases in tangible computing. First of all, there is no single point of control and interaction. Second, sequential ordering does not hold and finally, we use the physical properties of the interface to suggest its use.
Social computing refers to the application of sociological understanding to the design of interactive systems which becomes significant when we look at the context in which computation is put to work. This context is as much social as technical; computation is part of a network of social relationships between people, institutions and practices that sociology can help us explore. There are a number of different sociological approaches, where the observational study of behaviour, originated from anthropology, is a common feature they share. Whereas sociology examines social relationships, anthropology studies the culture that gives those relationships meaning.
Ethnography, an aspect of anthropology, places an emphasis on the detailed understanding of culture, through intensive, long-term involvement. It represents the culture from the member’s point of view. In computing, the use of ethnographic methods can be helpful to relate the formalized work processes to how the work is actually carried out in practice.
Two fundamental features of the ethnomethodological perspective are accountability and abstraction. Acting rationally and perceiving action to be rational are reciprocal aspects, which constitute accountability. Where accountability describes the way actions are organized, abstraction does exactly the opposite. It hides information in order to isolate one piece of a system to all the rest. To bring these two aspects together in interface design the reflection technique has emerged. It states that it is a good idea to build systems that tell the user what they are doing, since humans have an interrogative nature. Another example is using space and place in the design process of interactive systems. Since we all share space in the everyday environment it provides a natural metaphor for collaborative system design. Using a view centred on “place” instead of “space” directs our attention towards the activities that take place in this “place” instead of the structure it has. It also reflects that the knowledge shared there is knowledge shared by a particular set of people based on their common experiences over time.
Chapter 4
In the previous chapters an outline was given concerning tangible and social computing. Although they seem as two totally different subjects, they actually are based on the same approaches. They are unified by an idea that is called embodiment. Embodiment is the common way in which we encounter physical and social reality in the everyday world. The embodied interaction with the world we live in is so natural to us, that it needs no thinking. Translating this interaction to an interactive system is a lot harder, though.
Embodiment has been explored most extensively within phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the elements of human experience. Especially the work of four phenomenological theorists – Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Schutz and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – have been relevant to questions of embodiment and interaction.
Heidegger, although following Husserl in attempting to uncover the intentionality of experience, opposed to this separation as he proposed that one clearly needed to be in order to think. Instead of being two separate things he argued being comes first; thinking is derived from being. He stated that the objects we use and see in this world disappear from our immediate concerns while using and seeing them; while being. Only when we need to, we think about their actual use and see the technology behind them.
As where Husserl and Heidegger concentrated on the individual experience of the world, Schutz extended phenomenology to encompass the social world. His program centred on the problem of intersubjectivity: how can we achieve a common experience of the world between different individuals? He stated that our understanding of the world and the (in)animate things in it, and the way we interact with them, are based on our own lived experience. We can see the work of Heidegger in the approach to language of Ludwig Wittgenstein. His theory stated that the setting in which language is used, contributes to its meaning.
The goal of Merleau-Ponty’s work was to reconcile Husserl’s with Heidegger’s philosophy. He accomplished this by focusing on the role of the body in mediating between internal and external experience.
There are a number of theorists that acknowledge our physical embodiment as a central aspect to how we act and react. J.J. Gibson, for instance, linked visual perception and the way our perception changes by movement of our body with our acting in the world. It laid the foundation for “ecological psychology”, which is concerned with the organism living and acting in the world. One of Gibson’s constructs that has been useful for HCI is the concept of “affordance”. An affordance is a property of the environment that affords action to appropriately equipped organisms. Using this concept can help in interactive design, as it can make appropriate use of a device clear to a user. Michael Polanyi used the idea of “tacit knowledge” (things that we know, but unconsciously) to try and understand the world. In a lot of situations we know what to do without being able to express how to do them. We just do.
