Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Where the action is

I can’t thank Ulises Mejias enough for posting his syllabus on Social Software Affordances.

I have become a big fan of Ulises and his work over the past year and decided to tackle his reading list for his social software course.

I am juggling two texts at the moment and wanted to share the “easier” of the two with you first.

Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (2004) by Paul Dourish is a good primer for understanding the significance of human-computer interaction (HCI).

This text’s main focus is tangible and social computing as it relates to embodied interaction.

Tangible computing encompasses the idea of distributing “computation across a variety of devices… spread throughout the physical environment and are sensitive to their location and their proximity to other devices (p. 15).” This concept is easily demonstrated as I move my computer around my house or office wherein I can connect to any number of printers or wireless hubs that recognize my computer.

Tangible computing seeks to augment other physical objects, a pen, a piece of paper, a toy, etc., with computational power. For example, as I pick up a piece of paper on my desk, a host of other related documents could be summoned on my work station providing me additional related references and resources.

Research in tangible computing is also interested in harnessing computational power with physical artifacts other than traditional graphical interfaces such as keyboards and mice. In essence, tangible computing is interested in exploring how to get the computer “out of the way” to provide people with a more direct interactive experience when harnessing computational affordances.

Social computing research also embodies the idea of how people and computers connect and seeks to uncover “the mechanisms through which people organize their activity, and the role that social and organizational settings play in this process (p. 16).”

This concept is readily being explored by a number of researchers with George Siemens work on Connectivism being one of the most accessible.

Both tangible and social computing draw on the ways that we “experience the everyday world.” Both ideas share the understanding “that you cannot separate the individual from the world in which that individual lives and acts (p. 18).”

According to Dourish, tangible and social computing are ultimately centered on the notion of embodiment. Specifically, embodiment focuses on three areas: the role played by the environment in which work takes place; how work really takes place (i.e., not work in the abstract, but in reality –- the unplanned, unforeseen, the unexpectedness of working environments); and the recognition of the variety of roles artifacts play in our daily interaction with them (e.g., my pen makes a nifty letter opener at times).

Dourish takes his notion of embodiment from the work of phenomenologists, where experience and interaction, thinking and acting, are aspects of the same experience. This lens provides us a means of investigating our world where tangible and social computing draw upon each other to guide our thinking towards how humans and computers interact, as well as inform and support the design, analysis, and evaluation of interactive systems.

Dourish covers a number of examples of embodied computing and phenomenology in his text providing the reader plenty of evidence to support his arguments for looking at HCI in such a manner.

What I find most fascinating from reading Dourish is the idea of computing in the ubiquitous sense. I have been comfortably tethered to my screen and keyboard for many years. I find my computer and desk at home to be a place of composure; a place where I can read, write, investigate, reflect and relax. I have never given much thought to the idea of my refrigerator telling me I’m low on cranberry juice and that a complete grocery order based on my shopping patterns has been placed at my local supermarket and will be delivered within the hour. Yet, this idea is not out of line given the computational and communicative power that exists at the moment.

Rather than framing the question in terms of “is this a good thing?,” I wonder how embodied computing will change the way I interact with the world. How will tangible computing change me and my habits or how will tangible computing and embodied artifacts adapt to my habits?

I feel it is important to recognize how computational power has changed our world and how it will continue to evolve and change our behavior, our way of interacting with the world and with others. Thus my parallel concerns with social justice, reflective thinking, and liberational politics.

There is a composition course offered at my uni in what is referred to as a networked writing environment. This environment is a rectangular room with no windows and about twenty five PC workstations networked together. Students interact digitally on assignments yet are sitting within inches of each other. They face a screen, not each other. They dialogue with their keyboards, not verbally. And I ask myself, what on earth is going on here? Is this a case of lack of foresight, a lack of thinking about the use of space and computational technology? Was the course set up like this on purpose and to what end? If this were an online course where students were separated by time and space, I could relate to the concept of a networked writing environment. But as it stands, I am sadly confused. Using technology and computers for the sake of using technology and computers is a mistake. My hope is that as we continue to study “where the action is” we do so in a fashion that is thoughtful, meaningful, and supportive.

Should we teach courses on distance teaching and learning in a face-to-face environment? Do I want Amazon telling me which books it thinks I might be interested in? How can I be sure my vote was properly counted in the last election?

If embodied interaction and social science go hand in hand I will feel a little bit safer. But only a little. Even so, I look forward to seeing what the future holds. Especially when I run out of coffee.