Dourish: Where the Action is (ch6, Moving Toward Design)

One of the first points Dourish makes is that “moving from theory back to design is a hard transition.” He makes the point that “theory and design are fundamentally different sorts of activities, carried out by different people with different training and presented to different audiences.” Then, after giving a few examples to support his theory, he begins to provide support for his theory that “social and tangible computing share a common foundation in embodied interaction.” He then begins to describe a few design principles, but he cautions against labeling such principles as rules: “[W]e will…[explore] a set of principles. These are not design recommendations, rules, or guidelines. Rules would lay down a method for design; guidelines would suggest to a designer what to do. However, given the variety of settings in which the embodied interaction approach is applied, it would be inappropriate to give rules or guidelines here.” At any rate, he proceeds to give 6 principles:

1. Computation is a medium
2. Meaning arises on multiple levels
3. Users, not designers, create and communicate meaning
4. Users, not designers, manage coupling
5. Embodied technologies participate in the world they represent
6. Embodied interaction turns action into meaning

Dourish then proceeds to provide a lot of reasoning, real-world examples, etc. to back up his principles.
The final section of this chapter is entitled “Beyond the Principles.” In it, Dourish interestingly sums up his perspective on the nature of his principles, how they might be implemented, etc.: “Presenting the design implications as principles as I have done here is certainly problematic. For one thing, the principles overlap and interact in a variety of ways; they are certainly not distinct. For another, they suggest directions but do not provide hard-and-fast recipes. However one reason to explore general principles rather than specific design recommendations is in the hope that they will be a little more robust to the rapid pace of technical development.” He goes on to say that “The principles are a starting point, then. They serve to orient us to a set of issues that any specific design may need to explore in more detail. They are the start of a much longer story.”