Week 5 Reading- Chapter 4

Chapter 4: “Being-in-the-World”: Embodied Interaction

Tangible and social computing reflects upon our familiarity with our interactions.
Focusing in the social and physical aspects
Tangible computing:
Attempts to capitalize on physical skills and the familiarity that people have with real
world objects

Embodiment:

• the common way that we encounter physical and social reality in everyday world
• Embodiment means possessing and acting through a physical manifestation in the world
• Embodied phenomena are those that by their very nature occur in real time and space

Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology

• criticised science and math and its removal from the everyday world
• phenomenology – uncover relationships between the objects and the consciousness
• analyse how to perceive and experience the phenomena of the everyday world
• rabbit example – when u see a rabbit u don’t just see a rabbit u recognise a rabbit and then you look at the rabbit

Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology

• I think therefore I am – two different and separate worlds
• Reality and mental experience
• Focused on ontological
• Forms and categories of existence
• Thought that we act in a world that is already organised - in terms of meanings we know what the world means to us
• Ready to hand (zuhanden)
• Present at hand (vorhanden)
• Eg. A computer mouse
  Ready to hand – waiting for use
  Equipment fades into the background
  Present at hand – when using the mouse
  The mouse becomes an object of an activity

Schutz’s Phenomenology of the Social World

• Uses phenomenological tradition
• Intersubjectivity = mundane practical problem
• Solved through social actor in the course of their action and interaction
• Assumption of rationality is part of the natural attitude
  
  

Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception

• Wanted to reconcile Husserl’s philosophy of essences with Heidegger’s philosophy of being
• The body was a central theme
• Bridged the gap between the two theories
• Embodied nature of action split into 3
  1. physical embodiment of human
  2. bodily skills and situational responses that have been developed
  3. cultural skills – understanding of the cultural world in which we are embedded
• These combined influence our understanding of our own embodiment (phenomenological body and)
• How others understand it (objective body)