Where the Action Is

The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

MIT Press

Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly
successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the
world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action. In this
book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction.
He looks at how what he calls "embodied interaction" -- an approach to interacting
with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than
disembodied rationality -- reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin
Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The
phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract
cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on
the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks
in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how
they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could
affect the design of future interactive systems.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dourish, Paul

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Informatik Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion

Über Autor(innen)

Dourish, Paul
Paul Dourish is Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information
and Computer Sciences with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and in
Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of
Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (MIT
Press, 2001, 2004).