Paul Dourish > Quotes

“Perception begins with what is experienced, rather than beginning with what is expected; the model is to "see and understand" rather than "understand and see.”
― Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

“While any software system introduces some kind of formalization of the world, HCI (like AI) deals with formalizations of human cognition and activity. These are the issues that have lay at the heart of philosophical debate for centuries. In some ways, it would be hard to imagine a more philosophical enterprise.”
― Paul Dourish

“Our experience using computers reflects a trade-off that was made fifty years ago or more.”
― Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

“Computation is fundamentally a representational medium, but as we attempt to expand the ways in which we interact with computation, we need to pay attention to the duality of representation and participation.”
― Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

“At the same time, those powerful computers spend 95 percent of their time doing absolutely nothing. Modern personal computers perform very few tasks that use their full capacity for longer than a second or two. Outside these brief bursts of activity, most of the time they do nothing at all, generally while we try to figure out what to make of what just happened or what we want to do next.”
― Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

“Third, they reflect a different perspective on the role of computation, in which computation is integrated much more directly with the artifacts themselves. In the other examples, while they have aimed to distribute computation throughout the environment, there has always been a distinct "seam" between the computational and the physical worlds at the points where they meet.”
― Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

“In particular, I want to present the stages in the historical development of user interfaces in terms of the different sets of human skills they are designed to exploit.”
― Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

“It has been a long transition from interacting with computers using a soldering iron to interacting using a mouse. It has been neither smooth nor planned.”
― Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

“three related ways: through the configurability of space, through the relationship of body to task, and through physical constraints.”
― Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction