By karenmmartin on situated

A presence of phenomenologists; Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Schutz & Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Following up here on my last post on Where the Action Is and looking a little deeper into the links that Paul Dourish draws between phenomenology and embodied interaction.

After a swift fly-past of momentous people in the history of the development of phenomenology, Paul Dourish explains how this theory is linked to his use of the term ‘embodiment’; “I am using the term largely to capture a sense of ‘phenomenological presence,’ the way that a variety of interactive phenomena arise from a direct and engaged participation in the world.” and he emphasises that this includes both physically realized and socially situated phenomena.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology, in this case, being defined as;

“Phenomenology is primarily concerned with how we perceive, experience, and act in the world around us. What differentiates it from other approaches is its central emphasis on the actual phenomena of experience, where other approaches might be concerned with abstract world models…. Thinking does not occur separately from being and acting…. In addition to perception, it is also concerned with action, with understanding, and with how these are all related to each other, as part and parcel of our daily experience as participants in the world.” [p21]

Meaning

“What the phenomenologists have explored is the relationship between embodied action and meaning. For them, the source of meaning (and meaningfulness) is not a collection of abstract, idealized entities; instead it is to be found in the world in which we act, and which acts upon us. This world is already filled with meaning. Its meaning is to be found in the way in which it reveals itself to us as being available for our actions. It is only through those actions, and the possibility for actions that the world affords us, that we can come to find the world, in both its physical and social manifestations, meaningful.” [p116]

The idea of meaning being out in the world is expressed, as Paul Dourish goes on to say, in the Ecological Psychology of J.J. Gibson. As I remember (and it’s a while since I read ’The Senses Considered As Perceptual Systems‘ so I’ll try and check up on this) Ecological Psychology takes the view that an individual’s perception of the world is greatly affected by the context or situation in which they find themselves and that this context influences their perception of that situation. (Oo – that could be so wrong!)

Perception

The work of the neuropsychologist Richard Gregory, takes this further in suggesting that an individual’s perception of the external world not only depends on their current situation but also on their past experience, cultural background and knowledge. He does not suggest that perception is constructed entirely in the mind, but that dynamic brain processes add ‘extra value’ to an individual’s sensorial perceptions of their environment. For example, he explains that, as we walk towards a rainbow, we are not surprised when it doesn’t appear to come closer in the way that a house or other object might, once we understand that the rainbow is a creation of physics [p. 195].

Similarly, the following extract from his book ‘Eye and Mind‘ describes how people in Western cultures and those from Zulu culture respond differently to one particular perceptual illusion;

“The Western world has visual environments with many straight parallel lines, such as roads, and right-angular corners of buildings and furniture and so on. These are strong, generally reliable perspective cues to distance” [Eye and Brain p150] On the other hand, in Zulu culture  “Their world has been described as a ‘circular culture’ – traditionally their huts were round, they did not plough their land in straight furrows, but in curves, and few of their possessions had corners or straight lines… it is found that they experienced the Muller-Lyer arrow illusion to only a small extent, and were hardly affected at all by other such distortion illusion figures.”

Fig. 1. The Muller Lyons arrow illusion where two arrows of the same length appear different. Fig. 2. Perspective illusion

Why does this matter to the design of interactive systems? I suppose that, for me, while phenomenology provides a philosophical standpoint from which to view embodied interaction I am also looking for an empirical position which might inform design studies and hypotheses on how and why people react to certain interaction projects in the way they do.

The value of exploring social and cultural differences is increasingly recognised in HCI but this is usually done through anthropological or ethnographical methods. While the outcome of these investigations might inform a design (obviously this is not the only or even the most desirable purpose of this type of work!) it can do little to increase a designer’s understanding of how the sensory properties of a design will be perceived unless this aspect is explicitly explored in the ethnographic study. Design studies might provide some insight into our use and experience of different formulations of pattern, colour, shape and material but these do not generally take into account the kinds of cultural differences in perception that Richard Gregory has uncovered. So it seems to me that it is important when designing a system to take perceptual differences in aesthetics into account as well as perceptual differences in culture.

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By karenmmartin on situated

Embodied Action with the Nintendo Wii

Ooooooh, this is going to be a long one. Make yourself a cup of tea and find a comfy chair. I’ve going to try and summarise the ideas in ‘Where the Action is’ by Paul Dourish that are relevant to my work. And that’s a lot of ideas…

Published in 2001, Where the Action is brought ideas of embodied interaction and social computing to the attention of the HCI research community. In the past six years these ideas have been discussed and explored in projects from groups such as the Social Computing Groups at Microsoft and IBM, and the People and Practices Group at Intel, and it seems that these ideas opened up a very important space and direction for HCI. In particular by introducing the ideas of embodied interaction and social computing, and describing a methodology for researching these areas.

Embodied Interaction

Embodied Interaction is the term Paul Dourish uses to describe an approach which places an emphasis on understanding and incorporating our relationship with the world around us, both physical and social, into the design and use of interactive systems. The two strands of HCI research he brings together under this term are tangible computing and social computing. The connection made in this book has become even clearer over the past six years, during which time ubiquitous computing and the ‘internet of things’ have both emerged as prominent fields of research. Paul Dourish suggests that this link comes as a result of identical underlying principles, that is, both tangible and social computing “exploit our familiarity and facility with the everyday world – whether it is a world of social interaction or physical artifacts. … Both approaches draw on the fact that the ways in which we experience the world are through directly interacting with it, and that we act in the world by exploring the opportunities for action that it provides to us – whether through its physical configuration, or through socially constructed meanings. In other words, they share an understanding that you cannot separate the individual from the world in which that individual lives and acts.” [pp16-17].

In this way, embodied interaction can be considered as “not simply physical reality” but rather “denotes a form of participative status. Embodiment is about the fact that things are embedded in the world, and the ways in which their reality depends on being embedded. So it applies to spoken conversations just as much as to apples or bookshelves; but it’s also the dividing line between an apple and the idea of an apple.” [pp17-18]

Different degrees of embodiment in navigation

Drawing together the threads of thought that run through ethnomethodology and phenomenology, Paul Dourish outlines three major elements that are common to these approaches and can be found also in approaches to tangible and social computing;

1) Embodiment “‘Embodiment’ does not simply mean ‘physical manifestation.’ Rather, it means being grounded in everyday, mundane experience. The claim of the approaches outlined here is that embodiment is a foundational property, out of which meaning, theory, and action arise. They all place the source of action and meaning in the world. Embodiment is a participative status, a way of being, rather than a physical property.” [p125]

2) Practice “the approaches focus on practice: everyday engagement with the world directed toward the accomplishment of practical tasks. They all take action in the world to be fundamental to our understandings of the world and our relationship with it. So, their perspective is not simply that we are embodied in the world, but also that the world is the site and setting of all activity. It shapes and is shaped by the activities of embodied agents.” [p125]

3) The Source of Meaning “They point to embodied practical action as the source of meaning. We find the world meaningful primarily with respect to the ways in which we act within it.” [p125]

With this last point I am not clear if Paul Dourish is saying that meaning exists in the world and is revealed to us through our actions, or if meaning is constructed dynamically between our actions in the world and our perception of those actions which is informed by our experience as cultural and social beings. (This second view also draws on ideas from the work of Richard Gregory which I’ve been reading. I’ll write more about it at some point.)

Social Computing

Was the term ’social computing’ first defined in this book? I am not sure. The definition given here, however, is that social computing “attempts to incorporate understandings of the social world into interactive systems” [p16].  Social computing is done by sociologists and technologists working together in the design process bringing a sociological perspective to bear on many aspects of the design, appropriation and evaluation of interactive systems.

The sociological approaches that have had the greatest impact on HCI are anthropology and ethnography. Following Clifford Geertz, Dourish suggests that the differences between these two related approaches is that “sociology examines the emergence and maintenance of social structures and patterns of social interaction, anthropology studies the cultural webs of signification that give these structures and interactions meaning.” [p57]

Ethnography is an anthropological approach using methods that place ”an emphasis on the detailed understanding of culture, through intensive long-term involvement… It is often based upon participant-observation, in which the ethnographer immerses himself or herself in the culture in question. The central element is to explore the member’s own view of his or her life and culture. That implies the need to be able to describe not just what the members of that culture do but what they experience in doing it; why it is done and how it fits into the fabric of their daily lives.”

This does not mean that the reports from subjects should be accepted as truth without question, but it represents an attempt to “avoid preconceptions or analytic orientations from outside the specific setting of the investigation.” [p59] I wonder to what extent this is possible? It seems to me that we would always interpret new information in relation to our past experiences, (again, thinking of Richard Gregory’s experiments and also the ideas in this paper.)

Observing waiting technologies in use: Pedestrian Crossing; Queuing system; ATM

The understanding of the context in which the system will be put to use is one aspect of social computing. As Dourish puts it “Computation is part of a richer fabric of relationships between people, institutions, and practices that sociology can help us to explore.” and this includes the interaction of the designer and the user through the system. “Even the most isolated and individual interaction with a computer system is still fundamentally a social activity” when you think of HCI as “a form of mediated communication between the end user and the system designer, who must structure the system so that it can be understood by the user” where “the communication between designer and user takes place against a backdrop of commonly held social understandings.” [p56]

Exploring Embodiment in Practice

Visual arts and dance both have strands of work rooted in embodiment and phenomenology and it is interesting to consider how these themes have been explored in these other disciplines.

Phenomenology in the Visual Arts: Afrum by James Turrell; Weather Project by Olafur Elliasson, Tate Modern, London; ‘Rooftop Urban Park’ by Dan Graham. Dia Center for the Arts, NYC

I think there is a difference in the methods of investigation in the different disciplines as  HCI (and social computing in particular) is considering the everyday actions in everyday settings – the rarified environment of the art gallery or theatre is not for them and even the research lab which might be considered analagous is increasingly rejected. Increasingly, it is a collective, mobile and large-scale experience of embodiment that is being investigated in social computing projects.

Architecture might offer a more similar area for comparison (though it is worth reading Dan Hill’s words of warning on taking this too far..) as it also is based in the practice of everyday life and consequently challenges architects to balance the ever-changing unpredictable actions of the occupants with their own design preferences.

(I should admit this is just the tip of the Paul Dourish iceberg. Further posts on Where the Action Is will follow…)

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