Research in the Wild. Paul Marshall
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whether it can be considered a coherent program of research in HCI.
Many of the ideas about embodied interaction, which have been developed in HCI, built upon the phenomenological ideas of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger. These earlier philosophical writings were largely concerned with the essence of what it means to be, to see, to have a conscience and be aware of the world. The “lived” experiences were accounted for in terms of many aspects, but primarily in terms of space, time, and what it means to live in the world. Likewise, McCarthy and Wright’s (2004) influential Technology as Experience framework, concerned with the “felt” experience of being in the world, was based on phenomenology, and in particular, the writings of John Dewey and Mikhail Bakhtin. Instead of describing HCI in terms of how usable a device or interface is, they argued for explaining user’s interaction with technology more in terms of their felt experience, i.e., how something is felt by them. In so doing, they make the case for understanding users in terms of their whole experience of a technology, especially how they makes sense of it in the context of use, by considering the emotional, intellectual, and sensual aspects of their interactions with technology. This stance emphasizes the importance of understanding how people do not just use technology, but that they also live with it.
Contemporary philosophers have also become interested in understanding cognition in the world. Particularly notable, is Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ (1998) “Extended Mind” hypothesis—the underlying idea being that the mind does not have to be contained within the brain or physical body, but can be extended to elements of the environment. The hypothesis suggests how technology continues to extend and increase what humans are capable of doing, enabling them to make more rapid decisions, understand complex situations, and find solutions to difficult problems. Since, Clark and Chalmers ideas have been taken up and elaborated by other philosophers, including Ward and Stapleton’s (2012) provocative paper, “Es are good. Cognition as enacted, embodied, embedded, affective and extended.” A central idea is that tools and artifacts are absorbed into the body schema, extending and changing it. An example that is often used to illustrate this idea of extended cognition is the blind man with his stick—where the stick becomes an extension of his arm/hand, extending the boundary of the space surrounding his body and perception of the world.
Alva Noë (2009) also wrote cogently about how perception is not like looking at pictures in the mind; instead we perceive the world by gradual active inquiry and exploration of it. A central tenet of his position is that given that we spend all our lives embodied and situated in the world around us, it follows that our perceptual experiences are acquired through our bodily experiences with the world. Hence, it does not make sense to understand the mind, consciousness, or problem-solving as something that occurs in the brain. We are in the moment in a shared context—whether it is a football match, having dinner together, or engaged in banter on social media. A challenge is how to take into account this context when designing new technologies to aid, augment, or provide new opportunities for cognition, social interactions or cultural experiences.
Technologies, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and haptic feedback, have been able to provide philosophers with new interactive tools with which to investigate and validate embodied theories of body/mind. For example, Bird et al. (2009) explored how they could design tactile interfaces to mediate novel sensory information to enable people to experience the technology as an extension of themselves. Conversely, theories about embodied and the extended mind can inform the design of technologies that extend what humans can perceive and do in the world. For example, technologies have been designed to provide users with extended ways of perceiving the world, such as “Sixthsense” (Misty and Maes, 2009), which was a demonstration of a wearable gestural interface intended to augment the physical world with digital information that could be interacted with using natural hand gestures.
Both approaches can inform new theories about augmented cognition while also providing empirical evidence for embodied theories (cf. Rogers, 2011). For example, David Kirsh (2013) notes how, “The theory of embodied cognition offers us new ways to think about bodies, mind, and technology. Designing interactivity will never be the same.” He illustrates this bold claim with his research on how dancers use their bodies when rehearsing: where he demonstrated how they are able to learn and consolidate mastery of a complex dance phrase better by physically practicing a simplified but distorted model than by mentally simulating it undistorted (Kirsh, 2014). The idea that we think with our bodies, not just our brains, that in turn shapes how we think and solve problems is profound and has important implications for how we think about designing cognitive tools to think with and augment human behavior.
2.6 CURRENT THEORIZING WITHIN RESEARCH IN THE WILD
Whereas the anthropologists and philosophers’ alternative theories of cognition in the wild were largely pitted against cognitive psychology and cognitive science theories, that were mainstream at the time, today’s HCI researchers are largely concerned with technology in the wild, with no particular discipline to put to right. While a few sociologists, who had ventured into the field of HCI in the 1990s, railed against having any kind of theory about cognition, including a damning critique of Hutchins Cognition in the Wild (Button, 2008), many others embraced the ideas of explaining cognition as situated or distributed across technology, people, and artifacts—leading them to develop new conceptual frameworks from which to account for, analyze, and inform the design of situated technologies (e.g., Rogers and Ellis, 1994; Rogers, 1992; Halverson, 2002; Hollan et al., 2000; Furniss and Blandford, 2006; Liu et al., 2008).
At the same time, HCI research in the wild continues to discover how established theories of human cognition, largely derived from research conducted in the lab, are not adequate accounts of real-world behavior. A number of HCI researchers have found that old school cognitive and social theories do not describe or adequately account for how people interact with technology in their everyday lives, especially when considering how digital technologies and physical artifacts have now become so entwined in what people say, do, think, or remember (Rogers, 2012). For example, Bergman and Whittaker’s (2016) research on personal information management shows that classical theories of information management do not match up with how people actually manage their “digital stuff.” In contrast, based on their body of empirical work of what happens in the real world, they propose an alternative three-stage model of personal information management, where curation is viewed as being at the core of how people store, retrieve, manage, and exploit their data—be it via their phone, computer, laptop, or other device. They suggest this alternative theorizing can provide new insights and principles for how to design new digital management and navigation tools—that differ from existing approaches, such as tagging, searching, and grouping. Furthermore, they point out how people’s curation behaviors persist over time—despite changes in the technological devices they use, together with the exponential growth of digital content they create, keep, and want access to. Many of the problems people have organizing, storing and re-accessing their email are the same ones they have with their photos, personal data, or files. We are creatures of habit and they argue we need to design our technologies accordingly—rather than take existing theories of how to optimize information management/retrieval.
While the situated, distributed, and embodied theories have provided new understandings and framings of human activity in the real world, they only go so far. What is also needed, besides new theories of cognition to replace the old classical ones (cf. to Bergman and Whittaker’s approach, 2016), is to rethink theory more broadly, both at macro and micro level of analyses, to account for how people are using, relying on, and appropriating the diversity of technologies that have become suffused in their lives.
One way to achieve this is to explore the interdependences between design, technology, and behavior. While this approach is not new—for example, socio-technical systems theories has been around for years—the subject of interest is, i.e., theorizing about people’s everyday use and interactions with technologies and their environment. Another way is to begin theorizing about how digitalization, in its various manifestations, is affecting society. For example, consider the growing concern in society about whether children’s reading skills are declining. In particular, a question has been raised as to whether the practice of bedtime reading (which is considered instrumental to helping children learn to read independently)