how bodies matter

thinking through doing, performance, visibility, risk, and thick practice.

“we know more than we can tell”

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 interac-
tion is a more prudent path.

thinking through doing
learning through doing

physical interaction in the world facilitates cognitive development.

role of gesture
From studies of gesturing in face-to-face interactions, we know that people use gesture to conceptually plan speech production and to communicate thoughts that are not easily verbalized.

epistemic action

Distinguishing pragmatic action — manipulating artifacts to directly accomplish a task — from epistemic action — manipulating artifacts to better understand the task’s context — provides interpretation for such behavior.
One might expect that the predominant task in Tetris is
piece movement with the pragmatic effect of aligning the
piece with the optimal available space. However, contrary
to intuitions, the proportion of shape rotations later undone
by backtracking increases (not decreases) with increasing
Tetris-playing skill levels: players manipulate pieces to
understand how different options would work.

thinking through prototyping.

on representation
“solving a problem simply means representing a problem so as to make the solution transparent”

performance
action centered skills
hands
motor memory

Assigning dedicated actions to different functions of a user
interface can take better advantage of kinesthetic memory.
how to ride a bicycle, how to swim, how to improvise on the piano.

reflective reasoning is too slow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_cognition
experiential cognition as opposed to reflective cognition.

Tangible interfaces that engage the body can leverage body-
centric experiential cognition.
..rich physical input devices may provide benefit in other domains as well.

situated learning
learning by doing
learning by participating

We argue that an important, and rarely considered, aspect
of interaction design is the way in which the interface
enables this participation.

…transparency as a pedagogical technique, affording peer learning, discussion, and “constant critique of work in progress”

visibility facilitates coordination
The social life of physical artifacts and their visibility facilitate distributing the cognitive work of groups.

thick practice
First, the promise of new technology is that it pro-
vides previously unavailable functionality. Second, in
designing almost any new technology, one is drawing on
existing human understanding of the world. In the creation
of the new, much technology formalizes some aspects of a
work practice.

conclusion

“Tangible computing is of interest precisely because it is not purely physical. It is a physical realization of a symbolic reality”