Cognitive Sciences Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Introduction
This investigation explores relations between 1) a theory of human cognition, called Embodied Cognition, 2) the design of interactive systems and 3) the practice of ‘creative group meetings’ (of which the so-called ‘brainstorm’ is perhaps the best-known example). The investigation is one of Research-through-Design (Overbeeke et al., 2006). This means that, together with students and external stakeholders, I designed two interactive prototypes. Both systems contain a ‘mix’ of both physical and digital forms. Both are designed to be tools in creative meeting sessions, or brainstorms. The tools are meant to form a natural, element in the physical meeting space. The function of these devices is to support the formation of shared insight: that is, the tools should support the process by which participants together, during the activity, get a better grip on the design challenge that they are faced with. Over a series of iterations I reflected on the design process and outcome, and investigated how users interacted with the prototypes.

Embodied Cognition
A theory that might be helpful for designing technological tools, as part of the creative space, might be Embodied Cognition. The theory argues against the classic idea that thinking is something that happens purely ‘internal’ to us. Thinking, instead, emerges in action, out of continuous embodied interactions between brain, our body and the way our body is ‘situated’ in a physical- and social context. According to Embodied Cognition, cognition is best seen as a dynamic coupling (Clark, 1997; Dourish, 2001), or a process of coordination (Suchman, 2007; Clancey, 1997), or, as phenomenologists call it, as getting ‘grip’, through skilled action (Dreyfus, 2002; Merleau-Ponty, 1963).

One reason Embodied Cognition may be useful is because the field of interactive systems design shows a growing trend towards trying to integrate physical form and digital process. Looking at it from the perspective of Industrial Design, this entails adding interactive behaviors to physical products, using sensors, actuators, and the like. From the perspective of computer science, it means creating so-called ‘tangible’ interfaces, where various physical objects can be used to control digital information, a follow-up on the familiar ‘graphical’ interface. One may say it moves interaction with digital processes ‘back into the real world’, mixing it seamlessly with physical objects, environments, and social contexts.

Findings
The designs: NOOT and FLOOR-IT
NOOT, in its final form, consists of a system of tangible clips with which one can create time-markings in a continuous audio-recording of the creative session. In the final reflection I offered that NOOT couples individual moments of reflection-in-action to the overall group conversation, thereby supporting the formation of shared insight.

FLOOR-IT enables people to create digital photographs of any of the sketches or written texts (or other visual elements) created during the session. The traces form a conversational ‘scaffold’, to which people can point and refer during the talk. In a user study, comparing FLOOR-IT with a variation that projected the pictures on a shared wall, it was discovered that such traces function to help people position themselves socially in relation to others. Referring to ones personal trace during ongoing talk helps not so much to share factual information rather than that it serves to present yourself as a valuable partner in the activity, and to invite others to do so as well.

Based on my reflections on the design iterations, I was able to discern four variations of the theory that each have their own particular consequences for design. I call these the 1) distributed representation and computation perspective, 2) the socially situated practice perspective and 3) the sensorimotor & enactment perspective.

The distributed representation and computation perspective is perhaps most easily understood by those familiar with computational principles and it has proven to be a useful and relevant set of principles for interaction designers. Yet it actually hinders interaction designers in getting to the heart of the notion of embodiment. Instead, based on my design investigations I offer that the prime ingredients needed for understanding how my prototypes support shared insight are 1) the sensorimotor aspect of cognition (how insight emerges from real-time coupling of perception and action) and 2) the social situatedness of cognition (how cognition is socially coordinated between people). Moreover, sensorimotor coupling and social situatedness are strongly integrated in one unified embodied activity (Goodwin, 2000). In particular, the studies revealed how people would create expressive traces in the environment. Expressive traces, e.g. a physical sticky-note, a NOOT clip, or a trace in FLOOR-IT, are both the outcome of people’s earlier actions, as well guiding further action. That is, traces become part of people’s sensorimotor couplings. At the same time, expressive traces are also social artifacts, created in and for a social context, publicly available and socially accountable. They function to coordinate people’s social positioning in the physical space. Expressive traces form the linking pins between social interaction and sensorimotor coupling, thereby supporting the emergence of shared insight.

Conclusions for design
I offer a number of pitfalls and opportunities for designers that want to ground design in embodied cognition theory. I start with the claim that the classic interface concepts, which rely on information processing metaphors, are best explained with a ‘Distributed Representation and Computation’ version of embodied cognition. This goes also for many of the so-called ‘tangible media systems’, where tangible objects essentially ‘encode’ digital information in physical form. However useful, they stand in the way of designing for a more fundamental form of Embodied Cognition, as they too easily draw us back into ‘Cartesian thought’.

Based on Socially Situated Practices and Sensorimotor Coupling and Enactment, I propose a more fundamental form of Embodied Cognition Design. Embodied Cognition Design brings forth interactive systems that transform our ways of perceiving, our possibilities for acting, our ways of interacting socially with others, and it helps us to create endurable ‘expressive traces’ in the environment. In any concrete product proposal, all of these aspects will be part of the unified experience of the user. Through Embodied Cognition Design we may search for completely new roles for digital computing technology in human practices. This means going beyond the classical, Cartesian functions of storing, processing and presenting representational data. One consequence of this vision is that the ‘function’ of an artifact can no longer be predefined before one starts designing the ‘interface’: in Embodied Cognition Design, concrete interactions between the user and the system bring forth, or ‘enact’ the meaning that the system has for the user. This means one has to design the interactive behavior and ‘what the system is for’, both at the same time, with no a priori distinction between the digital- and the physical aspect, nor even the embedding context. One may for example design in iterative fashion, building series of functioning prototypes, which can be tried out such as to stay in close contact with the user and his context of practice throughout the entire project.