Embodied Cognition as a basis for

researching and designing interaction

Lecture 2

Socially Situated Practices

…What was it we were talking about?

…What was it that Ryle said (1949)

Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) was a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church College Oxford and in 1945 was elected to the Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy; a position he held until his retirement in 1968.

He was Editor of the journal Mind for almost twenty-five years.

“When we [talk about the mind] we are not making untestable inferences to any ghostly processes occurring in streams of consciousness which we are debarred from visiting; we are describing the ways in which those people conduct parts of their predominantly public behaviour.” (p. 39)

“The statement ‘the mind is its own place’… is not true, for the mind is not even a metaphorical ‘place’. On the contrary, the chessboard, the platform, the scholar’s desk, the judge’s bench, the lorry-driver’s seat, the studio and the football field are among its places. These are where people work and play stupidly or intelligently. ‘Mind’ is not the name of another person, working or frolicking behind an impenetrable screen; it is not the name of another place where work is done or games are played; and it is not thename of another tool with which work is done, or another appliance with which games are played.” (p 38-39)

Ryle’s distinction: Knowing-how vs Knowing that

Knowing-that:

Facts, histories, theories, propositions, descriptive claims about the world

Knowing-how:

The skill of being able to deal with the world in practical circumstances

The A-10 Amsterdam ring road

can be reached from all

directions. Follow the A-10 to the

Zuid/Amstelveen exit S 108. Turn

left at the end of the slip road

onto Amstelveenseweg: after

about three hundred yards (at the

VU University hospital building)

turn left again onto De Boelelaan.

VU University Amsterdam can be

reached via city routes S 108 and

S 109.

Turn left here

Anyway… where were we?…

Cognition is Distributed Computation Socially Situated!

Social Situatedness

Movie

Silent Disco:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ctxluRFbSs

Situated activity and social context

• More than: “social factors are also important”

• More than: people solve problems together. (Different from „Distributed Representation and Computation‟ theory, see first lecture)

• Situated activity: People make sense of the world through continuous „embodied‟ interaction with other people

• Social context: What we encounter in the world is only intelligiblefor us as seen against a common sense, socially shared „background‟.

• Practice: Situated activities in real-world contexts create „practices‟: In a practice, socially shared „know-how‟ is shared by all members of the community.

Exercise

• Try to observe the „social nature of sense-making‟: How

to people collaboratively make sense of things „in

practice‟?

– How do they use verbal interaction to this end?

– How do they use non-verbal interactions to this end?

– How is the body used to this end?

– How are physical objects and props used to this end?

– (Where) do you see social norms and -relationship at work as an

aspect of the sense-making process?

Lucy Suchman:

Planning as ‘situated action’

(improvisation)

• Real-world practice vs process

descriptions

• Studying „Ethno-methods‟ (Garfinkel,

1967)

• Conversation Analysis (Sacks, 1992) of

people using Xerox Copy machine

Flight strips: the role of artifacts

• Study by Hughes et al, 1995

• Studying practical and practiced everyday work of traffic controllers

• Flight strips do not just ‘record information’• Strips form part of the way in which work is

done (in practice, in social interactions)• (Dourish, 2001)

• Representations (like flight strips) “orient ourselves in a way that will allow us, through local interactions, to exploit some contingencies of our environment and avoid others (Suchman, 1987)”

Activity Theory (Vygotsky, Leontiev)

• Learning always first mediated by important others

(social scaffolding)

• Tool-use as accumulation and transmission of „social

knowledge‟

• (Internalization and externalization)

Situated learning (Lave, Wenger, ..) and

‘identity’

Movie

Thought(copy)

Input

Thought

External representationOf the thought

Classical model of communication

Communication as passing a message from one ‘mind’ to the other.

Situated Practice: making sense ‘in action’

Cognition is “where the (shared) action is”

(Dourish, 2001)

movie

Sensemaking in action

Accountability

• Within a community

• Observable and reportable behavior

• What counts as „normal‟ (rational) behavior to the other

• Available to members as situated practices of looking-and-telling

• Endless, ongoing, contingent accomplishment

• One acts in the awareness that the other person will hold you accountable for your actions:

• E.g. if you do not answer the door-bell, you know that something will be „thought of it‟ by the ringer (Schegloff)

“Implications for design”

A design example (to discuss)

Next lecture (in two weeks from now)

• Socially Situated Practice studies talk a lot about social interaction, communication, collaboration, etc…

• But the body here is used really secondary: it is used as a means to communicate between people.

• What about the embodiment of cognition?

• What about bodies „as such‟

• About their activity

• About movement

• The senses

• Skilled actions?

• Habits?

• Coupling?

• Temporal dynamics?