Photo courtesy of andyi

As part of the graduate course on Ubiquitous Computing the students were asked to comment on embodied interaction. Below is the response from Bruno Nadeau an ACE student, posted with his permission. Here is what Bruno thinks the opposite of embodied interaction is: "To define what embodied interaction is not, we must first look at what Dourish means when suggesting that a framework of embodied interaction underlies current research in human-computer interaction. Briefly, Dourish argues that certain areas of research are paying a special attention to our human embodiment in the world to study and design computing systems, and uses work from the fields of tangible and social computing to point out this trend. Dourish ties this approach he terms 'embodied interaction' with the work of philosophers – such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Schutz and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – who have questioned the notion of embodiment long before computers were part of our everyday life. Philosophically, embodiment is the being in-the-world, the experience of acting and interacting in and with the physical and social world that surrounds us. Embodiment is the experience of the body, not a body detached from its environment, but a body that is only definable in relation to the world it acts in. For Dourish, “embodied interaction is the creation, manipulation, and sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with artifacts.”

With this broad definition of embodied interaction in mind, it is impossible to think of an interaction that is not embodied. Even riding the most magical of animals, the unicorn, an interaction that inevitably takes place in-the-head, is affected by our behaviors learned through everyday embodied interaction in the world. However, Dourish's framework of embodied interaction comes in opposition to a predominant approach in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) that favors a form of interaction that takes place in the mind of the user, at the cost of involving the wide possibilities offered by our embodiment. The approach that Dourish seeks to shake out of its track is best exemplified by Sparky. Sparky is the Model Human Processor that Card and Moran (1983, p26) proposed to examine user interaction with the computer. For Card and Moran, the perceptive, motive and cognitive abilities of the user interact to form a model of the situation in the user's mind, model which is transformed in the head, leading to physical interaction with the computer often limited to typing on the keyboard or clicking a mouse. Although this model of human-computer interaction brought researchers to reflect on how we interact with the desktop computer, it fails to grab the current state of ubiquitous computing.

An approach that pays attention to embodied interaction requires that we go beyond creating metaphors of the world, that we use the world as a medium in the design of computing systems. The most well known metaphor for human-computer interaction, the one Sparky was facing, is the desktop metaphor. As the computer was originally destined to sit on the desk of work offices, the desktop metaphor appropriated artifacts and actions common to the workplace. Files, folders, spreadsheets and garbage cans were integrated into the virtual world displayed on the computer screen. Physical artifacts and physical actions where transformed into virtual representations with the goal of maintaining some of the properties of the physical world to ease the interaction. However, by removing the physical part of the interaction, having to interact solely through the mouse and keyboard, the desktop computer restrained the accomplishment of most tasks to primarily take place in the worker's head. Researchers realized the importance of physical interaction on the desktop which gave place to projects like the metaDesk. (Ullmer & Ishii, 1997) Through the metaDesk, and several similar projects that followed, (Patten et al., 2001; Patten et al., 2002) it became apparent an active body could play an important role in the everyday use of technology. More recently, Microsoft Surface (2008) is one example that learned from the research that took place in the last two decades, and in comparison with standard desktop computing, it tries to integrate certain aspects of our embodiment in the world. Allowing users to interact with both hands simultaneously and to utilize computational objects on the surface as part of an activity brings the interaction closer to the mundane use of our tables and the objects they support. From this, an approach that comes in opposition with Dourish's embodied interaction favors the use of cognitive processes on models formed in the user's mind without acknowledging for the importance of the active body.

But the active body must be examined in relation to its environment, never detached from it. Although Microsoft Surface is a significant step for human-computer interaction, it will be interesting to see how applications will manage the different situations it is placed in and the ways that simultaneous users can approach the device. People might place non-computational items on the device, crowding the table by using it as, well, a table. People might want to divide the table space to accomplish their respective task. An approach that does not pay attention to our embodied interaction with the tables that fills our environments would limit the body and its learned behavior at and around the table.

This bond between body and environment has been at the center of several mobile computing systems, which can more or less fall under the umbrella of embodied interaction. Although mobile computing inevitably involves the body moving through space, several system still neglect to pay attention to the body in its environment. As anyone who tried to deploy mobile applications will attest, this has significant impacts on the design and functioning of a system. Unlike the desktop computer, people walking freely in the busy streets of a city will often need to stop gazing at the screen to find their way. People will want to engage with others in their surrounding, moving the focus of attention away from the device. These are simple but important factors of the embodied use of mobile technology that designers have to come to grip with. Another aspect of mobile computing systems that give rise to recurrent problems is the reliance on a physical infrastructure. An approach that does not pay attention to embodied interaction might assume a model of the infrastructure that does not correspond to its complex use in the physical world. Seamless coverage is a common example for mobile phone and WiFi connectivity, GPS reception, etc. In the design process, an embodied approach must acknowledge that the physical infrastructure is far from seamless. Mobile games such as Can You See Me Now? (Benford et al., 2006) and Feeding Yoshi (Bell et al., 2006) have adopted a design approach that not only pay attention to the complexity of the infrastructure in the design, but also integrate it in the gameplay. An approach that comes in opposition to the framework of embodied interaction would design for a preconceived model of the user and the environment disconnected from the physical world where the application will be deployed, assuming that the model is a perfect simulation, whereas embodied interaction demands that a study of situate use must inform the design.

Dourish's framework of embodied interaction is broad and demands that we question human-computer interaction in terms of our embodiment, which is a notion that touches every aspects of our lives. The reach of our embodiment makes it difficult to pinpoint what is and what is not an approach that pays attention to embodied interaction, instead, the question becomes about the different aspects of design processes and systems that merge or clash with our embodiment in the world. Although our embodiment leads to individual human experience, we must face the same physical world from different perspectives and we engage in it in a social manner. In the end, an approach that drastically denies embodied interaction designs for the generic user, the couch-potato with restrained physical capacities, and assumes a limited relationship between the undergoing tasks and the environment a they are situated in. "

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• Benford, S. and Crabtree, A. and Flintham, M. and Drozd, A. and Anastasi, R. and Paxton, M. and Tandavanitj, N. and Adams, M. and Row-Farr, Ju (2006), Can You See Me Now?, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol 13, Number 1, pp100-133
• Card, S.K. and Moran, T.P. and Newell, A. (1983), The Psychology of Human-computer Interaction, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Microsoft Surface (2008), http://www.microsoft.com/surface, June 12, 2008
• Patten, J. and Ishii, H. and Hines, J. and Pangaro, G. (2001), Sensetable: a wireless object tracking platform for tangible user interfaces, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM Press New York, NY, USA, pp253--260
• Patten, J. and Recht, B. and Ishii, H. (2002), Audiopad: a tag-based interface for musical performance, Proceedings of the 2002 conference on New interfaces for musical expression, pp1--6
• Ullmer, B. and Ishii, H. (1997), The metaDESK: models and prototypes for tangible user interfaces, Proceedings of the 10th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, ACM Press New York, NY, USA, pp223—232