EEC and PD

I teach two courses on participatory design. This is the method of involving the end-users in that actual process of designing new products or services.

Theoretically I am interested in embodied, and even more in embedded cognition. Embedded cognition states that thinking is a process that emerges out of the interaction between brain, body and world. Parts of the world get recruited to perform important functions in a cognitive proces. They serve as external memory aids, external representations, visual clue's, they constrain possible behaviors (reducing choice options), present automatic orderings. The physical world is also the medium by which previous behavior of the agent itself, by the traces it leaves in the physical world, gets to influence subsequent patterns of behavior.

Yesterday I read a paper by Hollan, Hutchins and Kirsh. I already knew Hutchins and Kirsh as representatives of an embedded cognition perspective. As it turns out, Holland works in the same dept. in USCD (San Diego) and he is a representative of the participatory design movement (or to be more precise: ethnographic methods, which is in somewhere in the ballpark). The paper presents an argument of why, on the basis of an EEC perspective on cognition, one should do research and design using ethographic methods.

The argument runs as follows: Since parts of the local environment become part of the cognitive strategy that users use in dealing with a technology (think of an airline pilot in a cockpit), their expert knowledge is very 'personal' and the meaning of the interactions that the user engages in, and the function that certain parts of the artefact get to play in this interaction, is highly personal as well. This means that an objective, third-person investigation, especially in a sterile psychological lab, is not going to give you any inside into what is really going on in this user's real-life activities. EEC patterns of behavior grow in an historical process in which chance events and personal histories of users can have big influences on the resulting roles of the interface components in the activity of the user. So, we have to follow an empathic perspective on research and design, doing lot's of observation, interviews 'on site' and perhaps even 'participatory design': letting the user be part of the design team, as an expert of a knowledge domain that other people (not being the user) simply have no access to.

This is a nice article for me because it combines two of my interests that I hadn't really linked so explicitly. Apparently the various activities I engage in have some inner logic that I wasn't aware of yet. I wonder how Salsa dancing is going to fit in the picture...