How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design
Posted in 2000s, Articles, Cogniton, Theory on May 7th, 2013 by Dan – Be the first to commentKlemmer, Scott, Hartmann, Bjorn, and Takayama, Leila, “How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design,” 2006.
This paper presents five themes that we believe are particularly salient for designing and evaluating interactive systems. The first, thinking through doing, describes how thought (mind) and action (body) are deeply integrated and how they co-produce learning and reasoning. The second, performance, describes the rich actions our bodies are capable of, and how physical action can be both faster and more nuanced than symbolic cognition. The first two themes primarily address individual corporeality; the next two are primarily concerned with the social affordances. Visibility describes the role of artifacts in collaboration and cooperation. Risk explores how the uncertainty and risk of physical co-presence shapes interpersonal and human-computer interactions. The final theme, thickness of practice, suggests that because the pursuit of digital verisimilitude is more difficult than it might seem, embodied interaction is a more prudent path.