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The figure and ground of engagement

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Abstract

Engagement is important to the success of applications, systems and artefacts as diverse as robotics, pedagogy, games, interactive installations, and virtual reality applications. Yet engagement has proved to be remarkably difficult to define as it can take many forms, so many that it is difficult to isolate what these different instantiations have in common. Instead of pursuing an empirical perspective, the human side of engagement, namely, involvement is considered from a broadly Heideggerian perspective. As Heidegger has a deserved reputation for philosophical obscurity, all of the concepts adopted from his work are mapped onto the more familiar languages and vocabularies of psychology, human–computer interaction and cognitive science. It is argued that technology is engaging and our response to it is to be involved (with it). This resulting involvement–engagement dyad is thus an explicitly holistic account recognising roles for affordance, purpose, identity, affect and embodiment.

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Notes

  1. Dasein is traditonally left untranslated and is understood to mean “exist” and “there be”.

  2. Availability is not the only way we experience technology. Technology can also be experienced as unavailable. Technology is experienced as being unavailable when it breaks down, for example, I experience the word processing software I am using to write this as available as I compose these words but occasionally the software misbehaves. The formatting of the text sometimes behaves in unexpected and undesirable ways. When this happens, the technology becomes “visible”, that is, the task of writing is relegated to the background and the misbehaving software occupies the foreground. After dealing with the formatting problem, the software disappears into the background and cease to be unavailable.

    The third way in which we encounter technology is a little remote, Heidegger describes it as present-at-hand. We encounter technology (and so forth) as present-at-hand when we are engaged in “detached standing before” (Dreyfus 1991) or when we engage in theoretical reflection or during observation and experimentation.

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  1. Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK

    Phil Turner

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Turner, P. The figure and ground of engagement. AI & Soc 29, 33–43 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-012-0439-6

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