Toward a Theory of Digital Embodiment: Embodied Curriculum in Human and Computer Interaction

• In Event: Embodied Epistemologies and Methodologies in the Digital/New Media Curriculum

Abstract

1. Objectives or purposes

Human and computer interaction currently has grown out of the previous cognitive information processing, toward emotional, affective, and embodied interactions. Phenomenological, aesthetic, and affect theories emphasizing our deeply embodied, physical, and social experiences can easily be discerned from their design principles.

In education, with the prevalence of digital technologies in classrooms, and with the visual and new media turn in our time, examining embodied and social interactions and understanding how embodied learning experiences emerge and grow maybe essential in our educational research and curricular meaning making.


2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework

Katherine Hayles’ explanation on embodiment is relevant and noteworthy: “Embodiment is experienced from the inside, from the feelings, emotions, and sensations that constitute the vibrant living textures of our lives—all the more vibrant because we are only occasionally conscious of their humming vitality” (Hayles, 2002, 297). Embodiment is what we feel, sense, and when it happens we exercise our emotional and sensational responses to other human or nonhuman agents. It is ambiguous, ineffable, context-dependent, and is usually beyond description. In other words, embodiment cannot be represented, but only experienced. In human and computer interaction design, embodiment means responses rather than representations (Boehner, Sengers, & Warner, 2008), “felt experience” (McCarthy & Wright, 2005), and embodied interactions (Dourish, 2001) engaging our ontological, intersubjective beings and our intentionality. Embodied curriculum encourages embodied learning and knowing with our bodies, through bodily senses, movements, and emotions. Digital/new media technologies could provide vital social and immersive possibilities for embodied learning and knowing.

3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

This paper takes a theoretical and conceptual approach and examines three human and computer interaction designs in computing that bring out embodiment in their design principles.
Two projects by new media artist Scott Snibbe, Boundary Functions (1998) and Our Environment: Global Garden (2008), and one project by the Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Laboratory (SMALLab) will be analyzed.

4. Results or point of view

Embodied interactive design intends for a social immersive and felt experience enabled by technology can be both aesthetic and embodied. Embodied knowing and learning with/through digital technologies encourage educational experiences that are ongoing, aesthetic, situated, undetermined, and ends-in-means as John Dewey pointed out a century ago. I also analyze in what ways, in my view, some of them do engage embodiment in the fullest sense and center on responses and interactions, and some are less embodied, or barely embodied, only after-experiment reflections.


5. Scholarly significance of the study or work

As learning with new technologies in our time takes the visual and media turn, encourages “multimodality” of communication (Kress, 2003, 2009) that is beyond written words, embodied learning and knowing should have their centrality in our digital curriculum theorizing. Embodied curriculum not only encourages us to experience learning in new ways but also challenges us to explore in what way our experiences are embodied. The embodied experience cannot be a given, a priori, but must be the immediacy of relations emerged in the interaction that we feel and experience.

Author

• Mei W. Hoyt, University of North Texas