Reading reviews for week 5
Seven Principles to Design for Embodied Sensemaking
From the presentation by Caroline Hummels, and the paper on their work, Seven Principles to Design for Embodied Sensemaking, I was really able to grasp this new form of tangible interaction concepts. The work presents itself through a mobile setting that contains a collection of objects that to me seemed like a playground for people to express ideas. The motivation behind their work can be better described through this excerpt from the paper:
“Over the years we have noticed the difficulty of communication between people from different backgrounds and paradigms…we sometimes feel this tension, but we also experience a pleasant willingness to communicate, understand and learn from each other.”
In this pursuit of going beyond our usual communication methods, embodied sensemaking is one of the ways through which we can utilize our sensorimotor and the environment to respond to each other. This paper designed their setting to work on 7 principles:
- Social Situatedness
- Scaffolds
- Traces
- Interactive Imagery
- Dialogical Conversation
- First person perspective
- Catalyzing engagement
I do wonder if their experiment was inspired by how in some pre-kindergarten classes, children are presented with a room full of various toys to assess how they will respond to the environment and each other. I would also ask that as we grow up, would we behave with the same curiosity and openness in our gestures and social interactions to express our ideas?
Getting Down to Details: Using Theories of Cognition and Learning to Inform Tangible User Interface Design
The objective of this study was to design a Tangible Learning Design Framework that builds on the perspectives of cognitive, constructivist, embodied, distributed, and social strategies that are usually used for designing TUIs for learning.
This paper inquired into the existing process of designing TUIs for learning and addresses how there is not sufficient documentation and reasoning for why certain design choices are made to support learning. I was intrigued by the mention of how the learning design process would be different from the TUI designer’s and found the associated diagram very helpful.
The table that summarized each of the perspectives and their implications for TUI design with its physical objects, digital objects, actions on objects, informational relations, and learning activities relayed most of the major findings of the paper.
I do find myself asking how these relations were made on the basis of theoretical design analysis. As I am learning these concepts for the first time, I would have found the perspective of non-designers or researchers in the cognitive or behavioral sciences field to better augment these arguments.