Interaction Design for and with the Lived Body: Some Implications of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology

In 2001, Paul Dourish proposed the term embodied interaction to describe a new paradigm for interaction
design that focuses on the physical, bodily, and social aspects of our interaction with digital technology.
Dourish used Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception as the theoretical basis for his discussion of the
bodily nature of embodied interaction. This article extends Dourish’s work to introduce the human-computer
interaction community to ideas related to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the lived body. It also provides a
detailed analysis of two related topics: (1) embodied perception: the active and embodied nature of perception,
including the body’s ability to extent its sensory apparatus through digital technology; and (2) kinaesthetic
creativity: the body’s ability to relate in a direct and creative fashion with the “feel” dimension of interactive
products during the design process.