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.
This is my current best stab at it:
- It’s making new bodies out of computer parts. We engage the world by seeking out useful sensori-motor loops. Our bodies are critical parts of these sensori-motor loops. Some parts of tools are best described as part of our bodies.
- It’s about modeling computers in our heads. We construct internal models of external systems, and use these to predict useful interventions in the world. Over time these model/intervention/result/percept loops become sensori-motor loops as in (1) or they are externalized into extra-personal structures as in (3).
- It’s being a part of distributed cognitive systems that have computers in them too. We create and engage structures external to our bodies (other people, objects, culture, social structure) which allow us to take on larger cognitive problems than 1 & 2 alone would permit, or to do the same problems with less resources.
I’d like to draw a picture of this. Obviously, modeling activities (2) get offloaded into external structures (3). And sometimes we use modeling (2) to help us find and build external structures (3). Over time, the structures in (3) can become part of our bodies (1), and we use both our bodies (1) and external structures (3) to scaffold the modeling in (2). Basically, it’s a big rats nest. But I still want to draw it.
I’m trying to start blogging more about the work that I’m doing. Here’s a short essay I wrote yesterday introducing the idea of non-symbolic programming. The essay is below the fold.
Continue reading ‘Non-Symbolic Programming’
The kids’ table, originally uploaded by kynthiabrunette
I’m having a nice time at CHI 2007 in San Jose, CA. It’s wonderful to see old friends.