Embodied Cognition and the Magical Future of Interaction Design

Abstract

The theory of embodied cognition can provide HCI practitioners and theorists with new ideas about interaction and new principles for better designs. I support this claim with four ideas about cognition: (1) interacting with tools changes the way we think and perceive – tools, when manipulated, are soon absorbed into the body schema, and this absorption leads to fundamental changes in the way we perceive and conceive of our environments; (2) we think with our bodies not just with our brains; (3) we know more by doing than 3by seeing – there are times when physically performing an activity is better than watching someone else perform the activity, even though our motor resonance system fires strongly during other person observa tion; (4) there are times when we literally think with things. These four ideas have major implications for interaction design, especially the design of tangible, physical, context aware, and telepresence systems.

Keywords

• human-computer interaction
• embodied cognition
• distributed cognition
• situated cognition
• interaction design
• tangible interfaces
• physical computation
• mental simulation