Architecture, Embodiment, Phenomenology and Interface Design

It's been a long time since I've worked on this project, but I've just been inspired by an article in Interactions. It has some nice correlations with my Masters thesis (which I've recently reworked for a conference submission), particularly with respect to embodied interaction with space by way of Lefebvre. Additionally there are relations with cyborgs and cybernetics, Merleau-Ponty's habitual body image, and McLuhan's revolution of sense-ratio through electric media.

"First, program needs to be understood in relation to a reflexively generative relationship between bodies and the physical spaces they inhabit. French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebvre employed the notion of “habitus” to analyze this very reflexivity. Habitus is the root from which both habit (as in bodily habit) and habitat are derived. It can be used to discuss how one informs the other, how bodily habits, especially of large populations, wear grooves into space, producing habitats in their image"

"space frames and constrains the action that it houses, training bodies and thereby program in its image. To be sure, habit and habitat emerge at once, a conjoined machine, not in some never-ending representational reciprocity."

"Phones were “de-architecturalized”; they become an extension of our bodies, not our homes and offices."


@ARTICLE{Bratton2008,
author = {Benjamin H. Bratton},
title = {FEATURE What do we mean by "Program"?: the convergence of architecture
and interface design},
journal = {interactions},
year = {2008},
volume = {15},
pages = {20--26},
number = {3},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1353782.1353785},
issn = {1072-5520},
publisher = {ACM},
}