Here’s the quick abstract for what I will be talking about on the symposium on Creative Spaces on 17 june. But basically there is too much in it, and the story is too ‘big’ (too much to get your head around in one talk). So I want to narrow it down and slow it down a bit. I have been sort of lured into setting up the summary this way because I read one of the other contributers and they explicitly presented and “information processing model” of creative rooms. I thought that sounded very out-dated, but perhaps is is actually very modern! Is information processing back on the road again? Everything comes back, eventually, doesn’t it? Anyway I had to respond to that in some way I felt.

But I guess my ‘wooden horses’ about embodiment and embeddedness of cognition might themselves be sort of wearing off. Still, the practical issues underlying it are valid: Designers see computers as, well, as computers. And if they design on the basis of that conception, they will affect our lives in certain ways. While in fact computers do not have to be designed to be ‘computers’ for us, nowadays, computers can be anything, and we should quickly find out what we *want* computers to be for us instead of slowly drifting into a life in which everything is defined as an information search, storage and retrieval+ (storing my love in you, retrieving my self-esteem from my work, searching for inspiration with a walk in google-forest.

Feedback welcome.

TITLE Digital devices as embodied enablers: How computers may become part of an embodied, situated creative space.

SUMMARY

Parallel to the technological development of digital computing came the theoretical model of cognitivism, aka the information-processing view, in which human thought and action were seen primarily as processes of representation and computation. If human activity, e.g., a brainstorm in a creative room, is interpreted as an information proces, then the computer quite naturally connects to that proces, because a computer is essentially an information processing system. On the grounds of this fundamental philosophical assumption, one that is very much engrained in our popular technological culture, many computer applications have been developed. Such applications give the computer a role that highlight the information-processing aspects of the activity, or even force people to see it that way (in order to be able to use the system). Hence, such systems will ask the user to store information, retrieve information, compare data, represent their world in concrete linguistic units, symbolize things, categorize under name headings, and calculate ‘best next actions’, and so on. For example, in the creative environment, computer systems have been used to reduce the complex and subtle social activity of brainstorming to a ‘group decision’ proces, in which ’statements’ are summarized into ‘conclusions’ that are automatically generated by the computer. Moreover, in such a system, the physical forms and movements of the user and the system are completely irrelevant. In fact, in group decision rooms each user sits behind a screen and the the whole creative process is reduced to a purely ‘mental’ process in which the body and movement in space are disconnected from the activity.

The cognitivist interpretation of human thought has been under serious attack since the rise of an alternative theory called Embodied and Situated Cognition. According to ESC, intelligent action arises in action, as an emergent property from the tight interplay between the human body, the physical structure of the physical environment, the brain and the social setting. ESC puts realtime dynamic couplings, not information-processing, at the hart of the cognitive system. Given this new model, an interesting question becomes what the role of the computer might be within such an embodied system. In this presentation I take the creative room as a case-study. I will give examples of prototypes we have developed where the computer plays a fundamentally different role than that of a storage device for representations or a calculator of rational conclusions. Instead, the computer becomes a subtle assistent to an ongoing embodied interactions between people and the environment.

This new way of seeing computers asks new questions of designers. First: how do the physical aspects of the artefact relate to it’s digital properties? In an embodied view those two cannot be seen as seperate. Thus one cannot design software independent from the industrial design or interior design of the space, as is the standard practice of today. Perhaps some of the things one would easily design in software, may be just as well be supported by physical forms in the space (e.g. tangible interaction), and perhaps some of the things that one would normally design physically might now become interwoven with software in subtle ways (e.g. augmented reality). The second question relates to the design process: considering that embodied and situated activities are complex, personal and context dependent (based on your body in that particular environment in that social context at that particular time), how may we analyse these systems such that we can design for them? One approach may be not to analyse first and design later, but instead to engage in an iterative, participatory design process by which the design and the user’s world are strongly intertwined activities, such that the design solution will itself be an ‘emergent’ result of an ongoing coupling proces between designers, users, and the evolving prototype.

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