I just finished a very short, very drafty draft of my second year project proposal. I wanted to put it together before asking Rafael, Ed, and Jim to be my committee members. It’s rough, but I’m pretty excited about where it’s going. Here’s the introduction:
A small but convincing body of mounting evidence suggests that tool use is, in some cases at least, a misnomer. Tools are not merely “used” by a distinct and well-defined “user”, but instead are actually assimilated into the body schema, occupying the same role as a hand, finger, or eyeball. There is both imaging (Maravita and Iriki, 2004) and behavioral (Yamamoto and Kitazawa, 2001) evidence suggesting that the same cognitive machinery used for biological body parts is used for tools. These results point towards a new, radical theory of embodiment and tool use, where body parts and tools are not distinct categories, but a unified pool of physical structures which a “profoundly embodied” agent (in the sense of Clark, 2007) opportunistically engages and reconfigures in order to adapt to its environment. This view is just beginning to achieve mainstream attention in cognitive science, notably in the aforementioned paper by Andy Clark.
These new insights should be particularly exciting to researchers studying human-computer interaction. HCI has long suffered a lackluster theoretical foundation both in academia and in industry, instead relying mostly on moderately effective but poorly understood methodologies and heuristics for designing digital systems. Theories of Psychology, and more recently Cognitive Science, have had limited success in explaining the “H” in HCI, and theories of computation and of external cognition have provided insight into the “C”, but rich theories of the actually interaction between the human and the machine which are predictive, prescriptive and generative have not yet materialized. [cite Rogers?]
The theory of “profound” embodiment is exactly that. The idea that tool use and embodiment are one in the same, supported by our burgeoning understanding of embodied cognition and the way it develops in humans and primates throughout their lifetimes, provides a solid platform for explaining the actual interaction between human agents and computing machines.
The broad research question behind this project is: by what mechanism does the human body change to include non-biological structures, and how can we use our understanding of that mechanism to inform the design of human-computer systems?