Snowed In

I had a meeting with my advisor Jim today, and he asked what the punchline for my second year project is going to be.  Here’s my best guess:

There’s a rich tradition developing of studying the role our bodies play in cognition (Nunez, Goodwin, others).  I have presented evidence that we can take these analysis methods and theories into the digital realm to study the digital extensions to our bodies.  Put another way, I have tried to show that our “digital body” is subject to the same sorts of analysis as our body body.  This is in line with Andy Clark’s notion of “radical embodiment”, where the body does not end at the skin, but extends opportunistically to include any structures that we can command.

This evidence points at a rich space for further inquiry.  The programmers I’ve been studying use a pretty impoverished “digital body”, composed of a pointer, a carat, a selection and a few windows.  Given that embodied activities in the digital realm are an important part of our problem solving, how can we create richer digital body parts that will enable more advanced cognition?

One approach to answering this question is to use the bridge I’ve created in my work between the digital realm, where we know very little about embodiment, and the physical realm, where we know much more.  We can analyze the work of Chuck Goodwin and others to look for common embodied activities that could be pushed across that bridge to help do digital work.

Another approach is to look closely at digital tasks and use embodiment theory as a foundation for the design process for better digital tools.

Anyway, not super punchy, but that’s the bush I’m beating around.

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