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 emphasises skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationality - reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasises 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 analyse and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems.

Author Biography

Paul Dourish is Associate Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. He is a former Senior Member of the Research Staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre.