Abstract
This paper critically explores what it means to Design for Embodied Being-in-the-world (D4EB). It aims to uncover what this perspective means for designing hybrids, the new interactive physical-digital artefacts developed in wearable, tangible and ubiquitous computing and augmented reality. D4EB is contrasted with the principle of embodied representation, applied for example in designing tangible interfaces between users and digital information. In contrast, D4EB starts from our phenomenological ‘being-in-the-world’. Hybrids are conceived as participating in socially situated, sensorimotor couplings that govern the way the lived body operates in the lifeworld. D4EB rejects conceptual dualisms between the (representational) mind and the (physical) body and between (inner) mind and (outside) world. To illustrate its core principles, three design cases are presented. The cases are part of ongoing design-research that formed the basis for the framework. D4EB is further discussed in relation to personal identity, the role of external representations and the role of the designer. D4EB promises to open up a theoretically informed, largely unexplored design space, which can help designers utilize the full power of hybrid technologies. Hybrids may be designed to support people in their embodied being by sustaining, enriching and generating new ways of attuning to the lifeworld.
Highlights
Where does the blind man’s self begin? At the tip of the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some point halfway up the stick? These questions are nonsense, because the stick is a pathway . . .[T]o draw a delimiting line across this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit, which determines the blind man’s locomotion.Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, [1] (p. 324).Recent years have seen increased interest in the design of what I call physical-digital hybrids, or hybrids, for short
Using three design cases to ground the analysis, the main question pursued in this paper is to explore what happens if we design hybrids explicitly to support a person’s most basic embodied being-in-the-world
The D4EB framework is the result of ongoing design-research involving a series of case studies in which hybrids were designed for several actual use contexts with as a guiding theme to design for embodied being-in-the-world
Summary
Where does the blind man’s self begin? At the tip of the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some point halfway up the stick? These questions are nonsense, because the stick is a pathway . . .[T]o draw a delimiting line across this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit, which determines the blind man’s locomotion.Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, [1] (p. 324).Recent years have seen increased interest in the design of what I call physical-digital hybrids, or hybrids, for short. These questions are nonsense, because the stick is a pathway. A hybrid is used here as an umbrella term for the interactive artefacts developed in fields such as Tangible Interaction [2], Ubiquitous Computing [3], Wearable computing [4], Augmented reality [5] and Smart or Intelligent Products [6]. In these young and exciting fields, mixing digital and physical forms has produced new, unconventional ‘things’ that we cannot always readily make sense of.
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