Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

by Paul Dourish

Description

"Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action. In this book Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls "embodied interaction"--An approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied show more rationality - reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems."--Jacket. show less

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jonas.lowgren 247 reviews

This book illustrates the value of foundational concepts not only for abstract reasoning but also for practical design. Dourish introduces the notion of embodiment, based mainly in phenomenological philosophy. By way of definition, embodied interaction is taken to be the creation, manipulation and sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with artifacts. Embodiment integrates the fields of tangible computing and social computing; Dourish covers many existing examples and outlines fruitful directions and principles for future interaction design.

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