Everyday Design Through the Lens of Embodied Interaction

Nathan J. Waddington & Ron Wakkary School of Interactive Arts and Technology

Simon Fraser University

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the idea of everyday design through the lenses of Embodied Interaction and Donald Norman’s ideas from ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Things’. The paper takes the theories discussed in these approaches, such as phenomenology and affordances, and explains how these ideas inform what an everyday object might be. The paper looks at embodied interaction and makes the argument that instances of everyday design can be considered as examples of embodied interaction. Lastly, the paper considers the implications of an embodied interaction view of everyday design for inform novel approaches to interfaces in museums and games as part of a research project in the GRAND NCE. KEYWORDS: Affordances, everyday design, everyday things, embodiment, embodied interaction, phenomenology.

1 INTRODUCTION What exactly is an everyday object? Norman speaks of the psychology of causality when discussing affordances, saying that “something that happens right after an action appears to be caused by that action” (Norman, 2002), This dovetails nicely with Dourish’s discussion of embodiment, that “embodied phenomena are those that by their very nature occur in real time and real space” (Dourish, 2001).

Dourish looks at what the relationship between embodied action and meaning, looking to the phenomenologists and psychologists to help set up a working definition of Embodied Interaction. Specific to my research interests, Dourish makes reference to Norman, speaking about affordances, ecological psychology, and HCI. In this paper we look at Dourish’s explanation of an affordance as a “three-way relationship between the environment, the organism, and an activity” (Dourish, 2001) and expand on how Norman’s work fits in with the approach that Dourish is setting out.

Is embodiment and phenomenology compatible with scientific (psychological) descriptions of phenomenal experience?

In this paper we set out summarize Paul Dourish’s discussions of Affordances and Phenomenology as they relate to Embodiment and Embodied Interaction. We will also summarize Donald Norman’s Psychopathology of Everyday Things chapter of The Design of Everyday Things and try to show the relationship between these two concepts and their potential to inform everyday design.

At this point, we should state a working definition of everyday design. Everyday design is the phenomenon of non-designers appropriating or modifying everyday objects or spaces or situations in order to create a new object, space or situation which is more suitable for the person doing the appropriating or modifying (Wakkary & Maestri, 2007).

Lastly we look at applying the theories presented to an actual occurrence of everyday design. We will use a close reading methodology to look at a situation that we have identified as an example of everyday design and deconstruct it to show that everyday designs are instances of embodied interaction.

This research intends to fill a gap in the field of design by looking at the creativity of non-designers (people who are not trained as designers) and treats their modifications of designed objects as design opportunities and seeks to codify the patterns in everyday design.

2 AFFORDANCES We are interested in mobile tangible computing, and if there might be a digital/tangible analogy to physical patterns which afford appropriation. To this end, we look at James Gibson and Donald Norman’s differing definitions of what an affordance is, and how they apply to our research.

2.1 Gibson Gibson’s work on affordances came from a psychological background in studying visual perception, traditional approaches to the topic, separating seeing from acting, caused him to move on to new ways of looking at the problem (Dourish, 2001, p. 117). Gibson’s starting point was, according to Dourish, not the physical link between neural activity and our optical apparatus, but instead it was the connections between the creature and its environment (2001).

Dourish summarizes Gibson’s work by describing it as mainly relating to visual perception, and how living creatures can see, recognize what they see, and act on it (2001). Dourish describes this work as ecological psychology, studying ‘knowledge in the world’ rather than studying ‘knowledge in the head’ (2001).

A main component of Gibson’s work is the affordance, which Dourish defines an affordance as a property of an environment that allows an action to be performed by an “appropriately equipped organism” (2001).

2.2 Norman Norman defines affordances differently than Gibson does. The Design of Everyday Things is about the psychology of everyday things, and principles of visibility, appropriate clues and feedback. Later in this paper we will discuss how affordances and phenomenology inform everyday design, as well as state my understanding of everyday objects based on Norman, Gibson, and the phenomenologists that Dourish describes.

In their paper, Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept, Joanna McGrenere and Wayne Ho discuss the differences between Norman’s affordances and Gibson’s affordances. Specifically referring the previous quote, “the term affordance…” (Norman, 2002, p. 9), McGrenere and Ho say that the significant differences start here, where Norman discusses both perceived and actual affordances, and suggesting that a perceived affordance may not actually be a property of the observed object, but is none the less an affordance, Norman suggests that an affordance refers to a properties of the object (McGrenere & Ho, 2000). Norman also deviates from Gibson in that Gibson does not make a distinction between the different affordances of an object, and

SFU School of Interactive Arts and Technology 2400 Central City Surrey, B.C. Canada nathan_waddington@sfu.ca rwakkary@sfu.ca

furthermore McGrenere and Ho state that for Norman, there is no actor as a frame of reference (2000).

McGrenere and Ho provide a very concise table of differences between Gibson’s and Normans Affordances, which we reproduce here to illustrate both theories:

Gibson’s Affordances • Offerings or action possibilities in the environment is

relation to the action capabilities of an actor • Independent of the actors’ experience, knowledge, culture,

or ability to perceive • Existence is binary – an affordance exists or it does not

exist Norman’s Affordances • Perceived properties that may or may not actually exist • Suggestions or clues as to how to use the properties • Can be dependent on the experience, knowledge, or culture

of the actor • Can make an action difficult or easy

Table 1. Table 1 Comparison of Gibson's and Norman's definition of the term affordance from Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept (McGrenere & Ho, 2000)

Later in this paper we show how affordances are used in everyday design, and how they align with Dourish and Gibson’s definition of the term.

3 EMBODIMENT This section, and the following sub-sections will be a summary of Dourish’s Embodied Interaction. First we will layout what Dourish means by embodiment, and then we will look at his research on the history of phenomenology as it relates to embodiment.

Dourish sets out several definitions of embodiment, the first introductory one is as follows: “embodiment is the common way in which we encounter physical and social reality in the everyday world,” (Dourish, 2001, p. 100). He further explains that embodied phenomena are experiences that happen to us directly, rather than happening abstractedly apart from us (Dourish, 2001, p. 100).

Next he states that “embodiment means possessing and acting through a physical manifestation in the world” (Dourish, 2001, p. 100). Embodiment is not just physical, and in fact describes other aspects, which occur directly in the world – Dourish (2001, p. 101) cites examples such as conversations and mutually engaged actions to show what some of these might be.

Dourish expands on this naïve definition by offering an elaborated one, “embodied phenomena are those that by their very nature occur in real time and real space” (Dourish, 2001, p. 101). This definition retains the physical presence, which the naïve definition offers, but it expands on it to include non-physical aspects, which occur in the world – specifically this new definition suggests participation in the world.

Before going into the phenomenological backdrop of embodied interaction, Dourish takes time to consider a problem that may come up. Namely that “if we are all embodied, and our actions are all embodied, then isn’t the term embodied interaction in danger of being meaningless” (Dourish, 2001, p. 102)? He replies to this by claiming that embodied interaction isn’t a form of interaction which is embodied, but is instead, a means of design and analysis of interaction which “takes embodiment to be central to, even constituent of, the whole phenomenon” (Dourish, 2001, p. 102).

4 PHENOMENOLOGY Dourish looks to four philosophers whose work in phenomenology particularly relates to embodiment. These four are Edmund Husserl (Transcendental Phenomenology), Martin Heidegger (Hermeneutic Phenomenology), Alfred Schutz (Phenomenology of the Social World) and lastly Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception). Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy whose primary area of focus is on human experience, and as a part of this focus “holds that the phenomena of experience are central to questions of ontology and epistemology” (Dourish, 2001, p. 103).

4.1 Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) started the philosophy of phenomenology. It is a way to understand and explore “the nature of human experience and perception” (Dourish, 2001, p. 103). Husserl’s main criticism of science relates to criticisms of scientific reductionism, where components are studied out of context and may not be relevant to systems as a whole – specifically Husserl’s criticism of the science of his time was that it’s conception of the world was divorced from the everyday world and of everyday practical concerns – in so doing, it divorced itself from people and their experience of being in and acting in the world (Dourish, 2001). Husserl wanted to rectify this and invented phenomenology, based on the phenomena of experience – he set about developing phenomenology (the philosophy of experience) as a rigorous science (Dourish, 2001).

Dourish (2001) explains that phenomenology aims to uncover the relationship between the objects of consciousness, and our mental experiences of those objects. Husserl developed two terms to help this, noema and noesis. Noema is the relationship between the objects of consciousness, that is, noema refers to the objects of intentionality. Noesis is the mental experiences of those objects. Making a separation between these two concepts is important because it allows phenomenologists to analyze the way that people perceive and how they experience the world. Dourish goes on to say that the phenomenologist must suspend the natural attitude (the assumption that the existence of the perceived objects is the basis of perception) if they are to be rigorous in their examination of the world, and states that phenomenology’s objective is an exploration of the origin of this natural attitude (2001).

Husserl postulates that there is a parallelism between what is perceived, and the act of perceiving it (Dourish, 2001, p. 105). He also conceived of lebenswelt, the life-world. This life-world is "the intersubjective, mundane world of background understandings and experiences of the world” (Dourish, 2001), this means that the life-world is where everyday experience occurs, and from where the natural attitude arises, and Husserl argued that this is where any scientific understanding emerges from (Dourish, 2001).

Husserl formulated Phenomenology as a rejection of the scientific and mathematical abstract and formalized reasoning of the time, and focused it on the pre-theoretical and the pre-rational (the tacit and understandable) world of everyday experience (Dourish, 2001, p. 106). This, according to Dourish (2001), had two significant influences, it focused attention to everyday experience as a valid area of study (rather than formalized knowledge as being the only seat of understanding), and that experience as a phenomenon was a subject of interest that could be studied in and of itself.

4.2 Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology Martin Heidegger was a student of Edmund Husserl, and took Husserl’s work on phenomenology as a starting point, developing

it in different directions from Husserl, and showing “how mental life and everyday experience were fundamentally intertwined” (Dourish, 2001). Dourish explains that both Heidegger and Husserl attempted to show the intentionality of experience, but Heidegger disagreed with Husserl’s mentalistic attitude – mentalistic being the way in which Husserl focused on the separation of physical everyday life and the cognitive and mental experience of it (2001). According to Dourish, Heidegger rejected the dualism of mind and body, and this is evident in how Heidegger argued the nature of being (that is, how people exist in the world) shaped the way that we understand the world – that is our understanding of the world is the way we are aware of being in it (2001).

Heidegger, instead of asking about ways in which we can know about the world, asked “how does the world reveal itself to us through our encounters with it” (Dourish, 2001), suggesting that the meaningfulness of our everyday experiences do not reside inside the heads of those doing the experiencing, but lay in the world (Dourish, 2001).

In Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), editor David Krell discusses a concept that Dourish calls central to Heidegger’s writing, the concept of Dasein – being-in-the-world. Krell writes, “It must never be confused with the existence of things that lie before us and are on hand or at hand as natural or cultural objects” (Heidegger, 2008, p. 48).

Dourish (2001) simplified the translation and explanation of the term Dasein to simply: being-in-the-world. Importantly to Everyday Design, Dourish states, “one of the ways that Dasein encounters the world is to be able to use what it finds in order to accomplish its goals” (2001), because it is built upon by the concepts of perception and affordances, particularly through Heidegger’s explanations of equipment and ready-to-hand and present-at-hand.

Heidegger described equipment as “essentially ‘something in-order-to’” (Dourish, 2001), and explains that equipment has two very important properties. Ready-to-hand is how we experience equipment when we are using it and are unaware of its properties, Dourish provides an example in a computer mouse, when we use the mouse to control the cursor we are unaware of the mouse and its properties, we are opening menus, selecting objects and so on – the mouse is ready-to-hand (2001, p. 109).

Dotov et al explore ready-to-hand and present-at-hand in their 2010 paper A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand, in which they claim that till now there has been no effort to test Heidegger’s ideas empirically, and so set out to test the transitions between ready-to-hand and unready-to-hand. Dotov et al ran two experiments, which “show that a smoothly coping participant-tool system can be temporarily disrupted and that this disruption causes a change in the participant’s awareness” (2010). They say that because this work is derived from Heidegger’s work, this “study offers evidence for the hypothesized transition from readiness-to-hand to unreadiness-to-hand” (Dotov et al, 2010).

4.3 Schutz’s Phenomenology of the Social World Alfred Schutz focused on the problem of intersubjectivity, and moved phenomenology from the study of individual experience to include the social world (Dourish, 2001). Because I can’t know that what I experience is what you experience, then how can the relationship between two people’s subjective experience be maintained (Dourish, 2001)? Schutz argues that what is meaningful about social action emerges from context, that is intersubjectivity wasn’t a universal law, but instead was a commonplace practical problem which was routinely solved by people in their day to day action and interaction (Dourish, 2001).

Schutz argues that because we assume others to be reasonable, that their actions do in fact seem reasonable—and this leads back to Husserl’s life-world, casting problems of sociology as much the same mundane routine problems as intersubjective problems, social problems are encountered and solved by social actors in their everyday life (Dourish, 2001).

4.4 Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher whose objective in phenomenology was to reconcile Husserl’s philosophy of essences and Heidegger’s philosophy of being. In negotiating these two stances, Merleau-Ponty emphasized the role of the body as a way to bridge between the internal and the external, saying “the body is neither subject nor object, but an ambiguous third party” (Dourish, 2001, p. 114). Of the four philosophers discussed by Dourish, Merleau-Ponty was the one most concerned with the concept of embodiment, in his work he set out three meanings for embodiment: 1. “The physical embodiment of a human subject, with legs and

arms, and of a certain size and shape” (2001)

2. “The set of bodily skills and situational response that we have developed” (2001)

3. “The cultural ‘skills,’ abilities, and understandings that we responsively gain from the cultural world in which we are embedded” (2001).

5 RETURN TO EMBODIMENT After going through the phenomenologists and looking at Norman and Gibson, Dourish goes back to the concept of embodiment and further refines the definition. Firstly, he notes that embodiment is taken as central to all of the cases presented, not simply being a physical manifestation, but instead being grounded in the everyday experience. Secondly, Dourish explains, all the approaches presented are practice oriented; everyday engagement with the world is aimed at accomplishing everyday, mundane tasks. Finally, all of the researchers and philosophers discussed by Dourish “point to embodied practical action as the source of meaning” (2001), seeing embodiment as an antecedent for intentionality, rather than the end purpose of it (Dourish, 2001).

At the end of the “‘Being-in-the-World’: Embodied Interaction” chapter, Dourish offers two revised definitions of embodied interaction:

“Embodiment is the property of our engagement with the world that allows us to make it meaningful” (Dourish, 2001, p. 126).

Which he then restates in terms of embodied interaction: “Embodied interaction is the creation, manipulation, and

sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with artifacts” (Dourish, 2001, p. 126).

In the remainder of this paper, we will look at everyday design with an eye to this revised statement of embodied interaction and make the argument that every day design is an instance of embodied interaction.

6 EVERYDAY DESIGN Phenomenology and affordances are relevant to everyday design and appropriation. Returning now to the discussion of Donald Norman’s chapter in The Design of Everyday Things, The question arises, what is an everyday object, space, or situation? We propose that everyday objects, spaces or situations, in the context of everyday design are those that are familiar to the actors doing the observation. Going back to Norman’s definition of an affordance being, at least in part, a perceived property (the other

part being actual properties) of an object (2002, p. 9), we might infer that for familiar objects there is more that is perceived than in unfamiliar objects (the number of actual properties of course staying the same). But, this does not take into account activities such as exploration. The same can be said of spaces and situations, the more mundane, that is, the more experienced and more familiar with a space or situation, the more everyday it becomes, and the more opportunity an actor has to discover affordances and thus to appropriate a space or situation. That is to say, the very mundaneness can lead to people actively experimenting and exploring, building up intentionality and tacit knowledge, which can then be used as a platform for appropriation.

Dourish says that “embodied skills depend on a tight coupling between perception and action,” introduces Polanyi’s concepts of proximal (being close by, or close at hand), distal (things being at a distance), and tacit knowledge, which are the things that we know, but aren’t necessarily able to say we know (Dourish, 2001), it is these qualities and affordances which help to make Everyday design an embodied interaction.

7 EVERYDAY DESIGN AND EMBODIED INTERACTION: A CLOSE READING

Figure 1 is an image of someone in the act of everyday design; the author took this picture in a SkyTrain station in Vancouver. To start this reading, lets identify the elements of interest. There is a floor, and a ceiling, and affixed to the ceiling are lights – of the floor and ceiling the only meaningful affordance is the light affording our actor seeing. There is the actor himself, and the objects that he has with him, his skateboard, his bag, and the contents of his bag. Let’s each of these objects in turn. The wall in this case is for holding up the roof and the railing, the railing affords grasping, and notably in this case support. The skateboard normally affords riding and carrying, but in this case the skateboard is also for hanging because it fits the railing and wall’s affordance of wedging, the board becomes the wedge. This action converts the wall, railing and skateboard into what Heidegger describes as equipment – not just a tool, but also a tool for some task, in this case supporting a bag so that the actor can comfortably deal with its contents. The bag is a backpack, and normally affords carrying, and being carried over the shoulders. Being able to be carried over the shoulders is being appropriated in this case to being able to be hung on a broad board – which itself is being appropriated from its normal affordance of supporting a rider (though the support affordance is here in both cases it is the unintended use which changes the perceived affordance). In this case the bag-skateboard-railing-wall

construction becomes equipment, and furthermore, become ready-to-hand in that the actor having set the construction and having hung the bag, is no longer aware of the work that the structure is doing, and sets to work on the business of dealing with the contents of the bag. The actor is not aware of the structure mediating the actions he is performing.

The transformation of the skateboard structure to ready-to-hand equipment indicates an engagement with the artifacts which becomes an embodied experience, and the cultural sharing of this experience, when compared to Dourish’s definition of embodied interaction, should count as a sharing of meaning, even though immediately after stating his definition he states that more exploration is needed into the implications of ‘meaning’ (2001). That being said, this argument should suffice to show this example of everyday design is an instance of embodied interaction.

8 IMPLICATIONS FOR PLAY AND PERFORMANCE Play and Performance is a project building “playful” museum guide systems within the GRAND NCE. As future research, we will explore how this concept of everyday design as embodied interaction can inform the design of technologies for museums and interactive game play. For example, as designers we consider designing for visitors who view the museum experience as “the creation, manipulation, and sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with artifacts” (Dourish, 2001, p. 126), which includes appropriations of all aspects of the museum environment.

9 CONCLUSION This paper summarized Paul Dourish’s ‘“Being-in-the-World”: Embodied Interaction’ chapter of his book Where the Action is and summarized Donald Norman’s ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Things’ chapter of The Design of Everyday Things.

The theories discussed in these books, phenomenology and affordances, were applied to everyday design, and have shown that everyday designs are in fact, instances of embodied interaction.

Following this same process of close reading and application of phenomenological and psychological principles discussed here to other instances of everyday design should show that they too are acts of embodied interaction.

REFERENCES [1] Dotov, D. G., Nie, L., and Chemero, A. (2010). A Demonstration of

the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand. PLoS ONE 5(3): e9433. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009433 Retrieved April 23, 2010, from http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0009433

[2] Dourish, P. (2001). Where the action is. Cambridge: The MIT Press. [3] Heidegger, M. (2008). Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927)

to The Task of Thinking (1964) (Rev. and expanded ed.) (D. F. Krell, Ed.). San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSanFrancisco.

[4] McGrenere, J. and Ho, W. (2000). Affordances: clarifying and evolving a concept. The proceedings of graphics interface. Montreal.

[5] Norman, D. (2002). The design of everyday things (2002 ed.). New York: Basic Books.

[6] Wakkary, R., & Maestri, L. (2007). The resourcefulness of everyday design. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on creativity & cognition (pp. 163-172). Washington, DC, USA: ACM.

Figure 1 Person using a skateboard and a railing to support a backpack in a train station