Human-Centered Systems (HCS)

Seminars

---

Thinking with body and things

Speaker: David Kirsh Department of Cognitive Science, UCSD
http://adrenaline.ucsd.edu/kirsh

Thursday Sept 22 13.15

Alan Turing, E-building, 2nd floor.

Abstract: My challenge is to explain how we think with our bodies and the things around us, how it can be literally true that there are times when dancers use their bodies as things to think with, or that students of physics can handle a cup of tea and, in that handling, co-opt the cup to help think about surface tension, suspensions, or gravity. The most effective interactive design enables people to couple so closely and seamlessly with things that they behave as one. I will use data from an extensive ethnographic study of a world-class choreographer at work, and also report on a few simple experiments to show that indeed there is such a think as enactive thought.

David Kirsh bio: David Kirsh is Professor and past chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD. He was educated at Oxford University (D.Phil), did post doctoral research at MIT in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and has held research or visiting professor positions at MIT and Stanford University. He has written extensively on situated and embodied cognition and especially on how the environment can be designed to simplify and extend cognition. He runs the Interactive Cognition Lab at UCSD where the focus is on the way humans are closely coupled to the outside world, and how human environments have been adapted to enable us to cope with the complexity of everyday life. Representative publications are: The Intelligent Use of Space, On Distinguishing Pragmatic from Epistemic Actions, Adapting the World Instead of Oneself, Why We Use Our Hands When We think, Situated Cognition and Problem Solving, Explaining Artifact Evolution, Thinking with External Representations, Thinking with the Body. He has won numerous awards and fellowships. He is currently working on a book on Designing Interaction.

Page responsible: Arne Jönsson
Last updated: 2012-08-17