Week 5: Reading

Chapter 4: "Being-in-the-World": Embodied Interaction

The topic on Embodiment
Abstract Conceptions vs. Physical World

Embodiment: Phenomena encountered directly vs abstractly
- Posses & acting through a physical manifestation in the world
- By nature occur in real time & space

Tangible Computing: Capitalise our physical skills & familiarity with real world objects
Social Computing: Relationship between social action & settings in which it unfolds

Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology
- Separates mental life and everyday experience
- Cartesian Dualism: mind & body
- Thinking derived from physical being thus inter-wined
Traditional: Our minds give meaning to the world
Husserl's: Meaning are embedded in the world

Mouse Example: Ready to hand (as a tool, an extension to the hand and used unconsciously)/ Present at hand (as an object)

Alfred Schutz Phenomenology
- Inter-subjectivity
Sharing of meaning & experience of the world (mutual understanding)
Through lived experience of our own
Rationality: Part of natural attitude
Assume: Others' experience is like our own

Gibson-HCI
Affordance of environmental objects: for "appropriately equipped" individuals

Activity -- Organism -- Environment (3 linking elements)

Gaver -> Virtual window: Extending Video Conferencing

Tacit Knowledge / Embodied Skills
Think Distal, act proximal
What/How things are to be done

Social World
The use of language & pictures representing relationships between entities in the world.

"Meaning of a word is its use in the language" -Wittgenstein
The language games perspective: language as a form of life.

Commonalities of all perspectives:
1. Embodiment: a way of being, participative, in the world.
2. Everyday engagement in accomplishing practical tasks.
3. Meaning from the way we act with this world, through embodied practical actions.

A few words on the review of this weeks reading:
All in all, this week's reading seems very relevant to all aspects of our everyday life. By using the Embodiment approach in HCI makes total sense in that things are based on how practical it performs, rather than how efficient it should perform theoretically in an ideal world, based on the designer's perspective.

In relation to the previous readings, Dourish brings together perspectives of authors in the field of phenomenology. This sets a solid understanding on the basis of HCI approaches such as Ethnography and other on-site approaches to user requirement analysis and evaluation.