Found “Where the Action Is”
This past weekend I finished Where the Action Is by Paul Dourish. It’s the book I didn’t know I needed to read years ago. Back then I spent a bit of time in meetings drawing grids of small circles and thinking “What IS a button?”. In Action Dourish tours through sociology, psychology, phillosophy, and HCI (among other areas) to support at a set of interaction principles that echo my own intuitive thoughts, but fully resolved. For example, his use of phenomenology to describe how we can move from action on an object to action through an object puts the table under my undergrad ideas of ”token chains” and “token switching” that I built from Costikyan’s token idea. Dourish offers arguments that could nullify nagging questions I’ve about interfaces and representation; for example, if the interface is roughly defined as the system with which we interact to effect change in a removed system, and we can move between interacting with a something and interacting through it simply by change our mental frame, then isn’t the interfaceness of something supremely subjective? If it is, does that mean we should design to facilitate the exposure of a system rather than hiding it? Dourish not only argues that there is no distinction between representation and implementation, but explains why the distinction exists in the first place (age old phillisophical splitting of mind and body). It’s all still sinking in (I’m just now writing this after finishing the book over two days go) so I may not be doing a good job of articulating.
His idea of “embodied interaction” and its implications cover two thirds of my thesis. I’m now trying to figure out how to best incorporate and/or build on his work; I’m trying to understand what changes this will have on my research plans (am I going to have to dive into ontology and phenomenology???). There’s too many thoughts to deal with at once and I’ll likely come back to this book repeatedly, so I’ll simply end this post here.
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