Episode 70 of The Informed Life podcast features the second part of my conversation with Karl Fast about embodiment and interaction. (If you haven’t done so already, also check out part one.)
Both conversations focus on a key subject for interaction designers: the relationship between mind and body. As Karl put it,
the big idea with embodiment here is that the mind is not the same thing as the brain. Our bodies, our tools, the space around us — how we move and act in the world — this is all part of our cognitive system; that our brain might be in the head, but our mind is embodied. Our mind extends out into the world. So, the systems and the tools, the information we have… all the things that we design that are exterior to the body, those should also be understood as part of the mind. They’re not just out there.
These two episodes serve as a good primer on key issues about our understanding of how we make sense of (and interact with) the world, and the limits of our current framing as practitioners. As Karl summarized it,
we need to have a better conceptual toolkit when we’re designing, when we’re creating these different things. We need to think about how what we are making is not just out there, but is connected in a meaningful way to what our brains can do. So, we should think about certain definitions — certain words — and try to understand them and develop new concepts for how we talk about this.
I hope you get as much value from hearing from Karl about this subject as I did.
The Informed Life episode 70: Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 2