The Co-Operative, Transformative Organization of Human Action and Knowledge
Human action is built by actively and simultaneously combining materials with intrinsically different properties into situated contextual configurations where they can mutually elaborate each other to create a whole that is both different from, and greater than, any of its constitutive parts. These resources include many different kinds of lexical and syntactic structures, prosody, gesture, embodied participation frameworks, sequential organization, and different kinds of materials in the environment, including tools created by others that structure local perception. The simultaneous use of different kinds of resources to build single actions has a number of consequences. First, different actors can contribute different kinds of materials that are implicated in the construction of a single action. For example embodied visual displays by hearers operate simultaneously on emerging talk by a speaker so that both the utterance and the turn have intrinsic organization that is both multi-party and multimodal. Someone with aphasia who is unable to produce lexical and syntactic structure can nonetheless contribute crucial prosodic and sequential materials to a local action, while appropriating the lexical contributions of others, and thus become a powerful speaker in conversation, despite catastrophically impoverished language. One effect of this simultaneous, distributed heterogeneity is that frequently the organization of action cannot be easily equated with the activities of single individuals, such as the person speaking at the moment, or with phenomena within a single medium such as talk. Second, subsequent action is frequently built through systematic transformations of the different kinds of materials provided by a prior action. In this process some elements of the prior contextual configuration, such as the encompassing participation framework, may remain unchanged, while others undergo significant modification. A punctual perspective on action, in which separate actions discretely follow one another, thus becomes more complex when action is seen to emerge within an unfolding mosaic of disparate materials and time frames which make possible not only systematic change, but also more enduring frameworks that provide crucial continuity. Third, the distributed, compositional structure of action provides a framework for developing the skills of newcomers within structured collaborative action. Fourth, human tools differ from the tools of other animals in that, like actions in talk, they are built by combining unlike materials into a whole not found in any of the individual parts (for example using a stone, a piece of wood and leather thongs to make an ax). This same combinatorial heterogeneity sits at the heart of human action in interaction, including language use. It creates within the unfolding organization of situated activity itself the distinctive forms of transformative collaborative action in the world, including socially organized perceptual and cognitive structures and the mutual alignment of bodies to each other, which constitutes us as humans.
Charles Goodwin is Professor of Applied Linguistics at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania, 1977, and a Doctor of Philosophy Honoris Causa from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Linköping Univeristy in 2009. His interests include video analysis of talk-in-interaction (including study of the discursive practices used by hearers and speakers to construct utterances, stories, and other forms of talk), grammar in context, cognition in the lived social world, gesture, gaze and embodiment as interactively organized social practices, aphasia in discourse, language in the professions and the ethnography of science. He has been involved in numerous studies including family interaction in the United States, the work of oceanographers in the mouth of Amazon, archaeologists in the United States and Argentina, geologists in the back country of Yellowstone, the organization of talk, vision and embodied action in the midst of surgery, and how a man with severe aphasia is able to function as a powerful speaker in conversation. As part of the Workplace Project at Xerox PARC he investigated cognition and talk-in-interaction in complex work setting. His publications include Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material World (edited with Jürgen Streeck and Curtis LeBaron) (Cambridge U. Press), Rethinking Context (Cambridge U. Press) (co-edited with Alessandro Duranti), Conversation and Brain Damage (Oxford U. Press), Conversational Organization, (Academic Press), Il Senso del Vedere: Pratichè Sociali della Significazione (Melterri Editore), Professional Vision (American Anthropologist), Action and Embodiment (Journal of Pragmatics), Constructing Meaning Through Prosody in Aphasia (Prosody in
Interaction, edited by Barth-Weingarten, et. al.), Ensembles of Emotion
(with M.H. Goodwin, et. al in Emotion in Interaction, edited by Sorjonen and Perakyla), How geoscientists think and learn (with Kastens et. al, EOS Transactions, American Geophysical Union), Can you see the cystic artery yet? (with Koschmann et. al, Journal of Pragmatics).
Infusing the Physical World into User Interfaces
Advances in new materials and manufacturing techniques are rapidly blending the computational and physical worlds. With every new turn in technology development -- e.g., discovering a novel "smart" material, inventing a more efficient manufacturing process or designing a faster microprocessor -- there are new and exciting ways to take user interfaces away from the screen and blend them into our living spaces and everyday objects, making them more responsive, intelligent and adaptive. As the world around us becomes increasingly infused with technology, the user interfaces and computers themselves will disappear into the background, blending into the physical world around us. Thus, the old tried-and-true paradigms for designing interaction and interfaces must be re-evaluated, re-designed and, in some cases, even discarded to take advantage of the new possibilities that these cutting-edge technologies provide. While the challenges and opportunities are distinct, the fundamental goal remains the same: to provide for the effortless and effective consumption, control and transmission of information at any time and in any place, while delivering a unique experience that is only possible with these emerging technologies.
In this talk I will present work produced by myself and the research group that I have been directing at Disney Research Pittsburgh. We are addressing these exciting challenges. This talk will cover projects investigating tactile and haptics interfaces, deformable computing devices, augmented reality interfaces and novel touch sensing techniques, as well as biologically-inspired interfaces, among others. The presentation will cover both projects conducted while at Sony Corporation and more recent research efforts in the Interaction Group at Walt Disney Research, Pittsburgh.
Dr. Ivan Poupyrev directs an Interaction Technology group in Disney Research's Pittsburgh Lab, a unit of Walt Disney Imagineering, tasked with dreaming up and developing future technologies for Disney parks, resorts, and cruises.
Dr. Poupyrev and his group focus on inventing new interactive technologies for the seamless blending of digital and physical properties in devices, everyday objects, and living environments, a direction he broadly refers to as physical computing. His interests, however, span a broad range of research fields including haptic user interfaces, tangible interfaces, shape-changing and flexible computers, augmented and virtual reality, as well as spatial 3D interaction. His research has been broadly published and has received awards at prestigious academic conferences, exhibited world-wide, widely reported in popular media, and released on the market in various consumer products and applications.
Prior to Disney, Ivan worked as a researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Tokyo, Japan. He also did a stint at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Washington as a Visiting Scientist while working on his Ph.D. dissertation at Hiroshima University, Japan.
Using Psychophysical Techniques to Design and Evaluate Multi-modal Interfaces
“Psychophysics” is an approach to evaluating human perception and action capabilities that emphasizes control over the stimulus environment. Virtual environments provide an ideal setting for psychophysical research, as they facilitate not only stimulus control but precise measurement of performance. In my research I have used the psychophysical approach to inform the design and evaluation of multi-modal interfaces that enable action in remote or virtual worlds or that compensate for sensori-motor impairment in the physical environment of the user. This talk will describe such projects, emphasizing the value of behavioral science to interface engineering.
Roberta Klatzky is Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is also on the faculty of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. She received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. She is the author of over 200 articles and chapters, and she has authored or edited 6 books,. Her research investigates perception, spatial thinking and action from the perspective of multiple modalities, sensory and symbolic, in real and virtual environments. Klatzky's basic research has been applied to tele-manipulation, image-guided surgery, navigation aids for the blind, and neural rehabilitation. Klatzky is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science, and a member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (honorary). For her research on perception and action, she received an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award and the Kurt Koffka Medaille from Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen, Germany. Her professional service includes governance roles in several societies and membership on the National Research Council's Committees on International Psychology, Human Factors, and Techniques for Enhancing Human Performance. She has served on research review panels for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the European Commission. She has been a member of many editorial boards and is currently an associate editor of ACM Transactions in Applied Perception and IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
