On Embodiment and Meaning

The core of Dourish’s theory is a concept of embodiment that reorients the way we think about what is important to offer as technology designers if we are interested in meaningful interactions with our technology. The author roots his thesis in the philosophy of phenomenology and a portion of the book is a review of its various manifestations.

What the phenomenologists have explored is the relationship between embodied action and meaning. For them, the source of meaning (and meaningfulness) is not a collection of abstract, idealized entities; instead, it is to be found in the world in which we act, and which acts upon us. The world is already filled with meaning. Its meaning is to be found in the way in which it reveals itself to us as being available for our actions. It is only through those actions, and the possibility for action that the world affords us, that we can come to find the world, in both its physical and social manifestations, meaningful. (p.116)

Dourish’s survey of phenomenology attempts to review a lot in a small amount of space, and the concept is not the most straightforward to grasp in the first place. In some manifestations, I feel writings in phenomenology tend to have a tone of mysticism that obscures the matter. But the point that Dourish pulls out of the readings to inform his definition of embodiment is that meaningful experience is uncovered by directly acting and participating in the real, everyday world.

By embodiment, I do not mean simply physical reality, although that is often one way in which it appears. Embodiment, instead, denotes a form of participative status. Embodiment is about the fact that things are embedded in the world, and the ways in which their reality depends on being embedded. (p.18)

The thought that our experiences are meaningful because they are embedded in the world perhaps seems commonsensical. But part of Dourish’s point is that the design of computer technologies has historically been driven by a cognitivist perspective that conceptualizes the behaviors of humans and computers into abstract goals or system requirements separate from the world. This is a perspective that pays close attention to the information that is transmitted, but not enough attention to how and in what settings that information is acted upon and, in turn, acts in the world. The tendency is to separate presentation from content, representation from action. And while it’s certainly helped us achieve many things with technology, Dourish warns that it has also eliminated possibilities for technology to participate in ways more aligned with human experience.

There is no homunculus sitting inside our heads, staring out at the world through our eyes, enacting some plan of action by manipulating our hands, and checking carefully to make sure we don’t overshoot when reaching for the coffee cup. We inhabit our bodies and they in turn inhabit the world, with seamless connections back and forth. (p.101-102)

Dourish uses tangible and social computing as examples of movements that signal the possibilities for embodied interaction.

Both approaches draw on the fact that the ways in which we experience the world are through directly interacting with it, and that we act in the world by exploring the opportunities for action that it provides for us—whether through its physical configuration, or through socially constructed meanings. In other words, they share an understanding that you cannot separate the individual from the world in which that individual lives and acts.… Physically, our experiences cannot be separated from the reality of our bodily presence in the world; and socially, too, the same relationship holds because our nature as social beings is based on the ways in which we act and interact, in real time, all the time. (p.17-18)