Embodied Interaction

Paul Dourish, with his approach of “embodied interaction” (Dourish 2001), was the first HCI researcher to intentionally map the insights of embodiment to HCI. In his perspective, embodied interaction focuses on the “interaction with computer systems that occupy our world, a world of physical and social reality, and that exploit this fact in how they interact with us.” He bases his approach partly on the phenomenology research of philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, but also addresses two emerging trends in HCI research – namely, tangible computing and social computing. The phenomenological view of embodiment used in his approach is not strictly restricted to experiences of the physical body. Dourish (2001) states that embodied phenomena occurring in real time and space

make interaction with the world meaningful. He points out that embodiment concerns how actions create meaningful events, and how others understand those actions as meaningful;

this covers far more than what people do. Based on this argumentation, Dourish (2001) defines embodied interaction as “the construction of shared meanings through interaction with artifacts”. Thus, embodied interaction is not intended to describe interaction; rather, it is conceived as an analytical framework for HCI that takes embodiment as a complete phenomenon into consideration.

Two emerging trends – tangible and social computing: In addition to the phenomenological embodiment perspective, Dourish (2001) considers two trends from the research field of HCI that were evolving at the time he was writing his book: tangible and social computing. He states that these new types of interfaces enable an “expansion of the range of human skills and abilities that can be incorporated into interaction with computers”

– in his perspective, embodiment is central to these alternative perspectives of interaction.

Tangible computing – With the advent of graspable interfaces (Fitzmaurice 1996) or TUIs (Ishii

& Ullmer 1997) at the end of the 20^th century, a new research field emerged that created projects including the Marble Answering Machine (Bishop 1992), the Digital Desk (Wellner 1993), Tangible Bits (Ishii & Ullmer 1997), and URP (Underkoffler & Ishii 1999). Dourish (2001) sees this form of interaction as an important way to integrate computation into the physical world. Tangible computing offers a wide variety of physical interactions that fit into his approach, e.g., by integration of physical mapping and exploitation of physical affordance and distributed (rather than sequential) interaction. Furthermore, he emphasizes that the augmentation of the real world with computational power transforms dead objects into

“active entities that respond to their environment and people’s activities”. This allows people to interact with computational devices through physical artifacts.

Social computing – Similarly, Dourish (2001, who has a strong research background in the field of CSCW) considers social computing as an attempt to transfer sociological understandings of the world into interactive systems. He argues that looking beyond the traditional single-user workplace, the involvement of other people and their activities could enhance HCI. He therefore proposes the application of anthropological and social ideas to facilitate the

“mechanism through which people organize activity, and the role that social and organizational settings play in this process”.

Meaning and coupling: Fundamental features of Dourish’s embodied interaction (2001) are “meaning” and “coupling”. From his point of view, embodiment and the associated phenomenology consist of the close coupling of action and meaning.

Meaning – In his approach to embodied interaction, meaning arises through interaction. From this perspective, technology and computing devices have no meaning until someone interacts with them.

Dourish (2001) further identifies three aspects of meaning: ontology, intersubjectivity, and intentionality. Onthology concerns people’s conceptual model of the world developed from perceived and (through interaction) experienced entities (e.g., computational artifacts) and relationships. Intersubjectivity is concerned with how meaning can be shared with others.

Thereby, this aspect can be split up into the communication of meaning from designer to user and the communication among users throughout a system. The third aspect, intentionality, describes the intention behind an action and thus the directedness of meaning.

Coupling – While actions generate meanings of entities for people, coupling is described as a tool to create relationships between entities. Only if this coupling has been established, actions can be executed by people through the entity. Dourish (2001) explains this concept using the example of a hammer (originally proposed by Heidegger): If a person uses a hammer to hit a nail, the hammer can be seen as an extension of the person’s arm. Hence, the hammer is coupled and the person is able to engage in the activity of hammering by acting through the hammer onto the nail. This concept demonstrates parallels to the mediated activity concept introduced in the discussion of activity theory (Chapter 2.1.3).

Design principles of embodied interaction: Based on the foundations described and his view of interaction as “not just how we act on technology, but how we act through it”

(Dourish 2001), Dourish developed six high-level design principles for HCI researchers to study how people interact with technology:

• Computation is a medium

• Meaning arises on multiple levels

• Users, not designers, create and communicate meaning

• Users, not designers, manage coupling

• Embodied technologies participate in the world they represent

• Embodied interaction turns action into meaning

These principles should not be seen as constituting a strict framework. Rather, they are meant to “observe or comment upon general features of embodied interaction that occur across a range of settings” (Dourish 2001).

Conclusion: In his embodied interaction approach, Dourish (2001) seeks to explain how people use computational artifacts in their activities and how these affect decisions. The concept that only an interaction with an artifact creates meaning is a perspective that will be considered in this thesis. The idea of people “interacting through” instead of “interacting with” a computational artifact as a medium draws strong parallels to activity theory.

From an embodied interaction point of view, it is essential for the design of interactive systems to understand that it is not the designer but rather the users themselves who create and communicate meaning by interacting with the system. However, as the approach of embodied interaction is quite theoretical and abstract, there are very few cases showing how these design principles have been applied in practice.