Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yetit is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulatesmodels of reality, people, and action. In this book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical basesof human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls "embodied interaction" -- an approachto interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather thandisembodied rationality -- reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, LudwigWittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasizesthe primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how thisperspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodiedinteraction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction arerelated, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they couldaffect the design of future interactive systems.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface
• 1 History of Interaction
• 2 Getting in Touch
• 3 Social Computing
• 4 Being-in-the-World: Embodied Interaction
• 5 Foundations
• 6 Moving Toward Design
• 7 Conclusions and Directions
• Notes
• References
• Index