I finally finished the Paul Dourish book, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. I thought it was insightful, and it got me thinking differently about the tools I use every day– from my cell phone to sticky notes to the clusters of icons on my computer screen.

For example, my cell phone is nothing but a bulge in my pocket when I’m not using it at all, and in Heidegger’s terms it is present-at-hand (p.109). This means if I look at or handle the phone, the phone-itself is the object of my attention. However, when I am using it to talk to a friend, my focus is on the conversation that it affords, and not the phone-itself as an object. At this point, in Heidegger’s terms, it becomes ready-to-hand. It becomes an object I act through, or an extension of me.

I can use a ready-to-hand tool to interact with my immediate environment, and ultimately with a distant environment, through a chain of associations. These series of associations are what Dourish calls coupling. It is through coupling that my local actions can have a remote effect.

When I interact with something locally like an instant messenger client on my computer, I expect a remote effect. I expect that the software on my computer translates my typed message into a format that can be sent across the internet, read by software on the receiving end, and made readable once again for my friend in Idaho or wherever.

My instant messenger client also has a component that adheres to one of the design principles proposed by Dourish: visibility of action. I can see if a friend on the other end is actively typing in their chat window by the status indictor at the bottom of the window. The message “Matt is typing a message” tells me much more than face value: it also tells me that Matt is actually sitting at his desk, that he got my leading message, and that he has time to type a reply, even if it is just “sorry, too busy to chat”!

But I also know that Matt is thinking the same way– he uses the same software I do when we chat. So if I’m not actively typing a message, I should get my cursor out of the “compose a message”. If I leave it there but do something else, it will look to Matt like I’m typing a long winded message. I learn by using the system how it modulates my actions. Dourish explains this when talking about designing awareness interfaces used in collaborative systems:

The ability to “see” another’s actions “through” the system can be provided explicitly by “awareness interfaces,” but more often, it will be something that users must learn to do by observing activities that take place in the system or information space. … Users must be able to understand how activities within the system are related to activities without; that is, how the system modulates the effects of a user’s actions. The most obvious way to learn this is through being able to see how our own activities are modulated when we interact with a system; developing an appreciation for how our own actions are reflected in the informational space helps us to understand how a particular state of affairs might be the result of a sequence of activities by someone else. (p.165)

This isn’t really an analysis of the book, but an analysis of some of small points I found interesting, and random examples tying the ideas in the book to my life. I’m sure I’ll continue to see the ideas in this book pop up in tools and ways I use them to interact in my environment.