Natural-Born Cyborgs
What Design can learn from Philosophy and Neuroscience
This is a three-part blog post. The first part will be about philosophical discipline of phenomenology and what that has to do with how we use tools. To keep you from falling asleep, there will also be Nazis and Street-Fighter references. In the second part, I’ll present findings from neuroscience that basically say the philosophers got it right. Finally, I will show you that this means that we’re all, in fact, cyborgs, and what that has to do how we use and hence should design tools, interfaces, and wearables.
If you rather listen to things than read them, here’s a video of a talk I gave on the subject:
Phenomenology: let’s sip whiskey and talk about feelings.
But first, let me take you to France. Paris, the city of love. In 1942. The city is under Nazi occupation. It’s night, long past the curfew, and outside SS patrols march down dark alleys with cobblestone streets. Inside, a man sat in front of a typewriter to work on the manuscript for his philosophical opus magnum “L’Être et le Néant” — “Being and Nothingness”.
Sartre and his lifelong partner Simone de Beauvoir would later become the most talked about celebrity couple in post-war France — think the Brangelina of the 50s, except with a lot more juicy affairs on the side. In 1949, de Beauvoir would publish “The Second Sex”, kickstarting second-wave feminism in Europe, and in 1964 Sartre would be awarded — and refuse — the Nobel Prize for his literary work.
“Hell is other people’s code” — JP Sartre. Well, something along these lines anyway.
But that night in 1942, he was tired. As he was typing on the manuscript, he tried to focus on the ideas, the concepts, the world the words he was typing were creating. But then his eyes became sore and weary, and the letters started to blur. He noticed how his attention shifted from the concepts to the letters that carry them. And then soon to his tired fingers that created those letters. Finally he couldn’t think about anything but his sore eyes and had trouble keeping them open.
Most ordinary people would just have decided to call it a night. But Sartre was anything but ordinary. He was a philosopher. Particularly, he was a phenomenologist. Phenomenology is the philosophical study of experiences, or more correctly, the study of structures of experiences. In a way, it’s a scientific discipline, a way of describing the world and theorising about it. But as opposed to physics or psychology, phenomenology is a first-person approach: you’re analysing, deconstructing and describing your own experiences and consciousness. Phenomenologists don’t study things for what they are, but for how they appear to us.
Sartre, being a phenomenologist, was quick to notice a certain pattern in his experiences. He noticed how his attention shifts from one thing to another — the ideas, the words, his fingers, his eyes. What’s interesting here is that his attention shifts from the subject of perception to the medium of perception. First he perceives the ideas through the words, then the typed words themselves become centre of his attention. Finally, his own eyes become the subject of his experience, rather than the medium, the method of experiencing.
Heidegger: Philosophical Hadouken Punch
His book ”Being and Nothingness” is of course a play on the title of Martin Heidegger’s seminal work “Being and Time” — “Sein und Zeit” in German, which Sartre read in a German prison camp when he was a prisoner of war in 1941. Being and Time was a philosophical Hadouken punch, blasting away 2500 years of philosophy that was in its way to answer questions like “Why is there something instead of nothing?”.
Spoiler alert: we still don’t know.
The book was written with a brutal accuracy that is only possible in German where you can make up words like Ersatzzeitgeist and Auskunftspflicht — which loosely translates to “the obligation to inform authorities about any changes in permanent residential address or marital status in a timely fashion”.
Needless to say, these linguistic “features” render Being and Time almost unreadable in any other language than German.
Heidegger introduces a distinction that is incredibly important in all of design, although we don’t call it like that: presence-at-hand and readiness-to-hand. Or, in German: vorhandensein and zuhandensein. What’s that? In his famous example, he considers a hammer. Alright, so most philosophers probably never used a hammer in their whole lives, which makes this example somewhat amusing.
When the hammer is lying on a table, we can look at it, analyse it, describe it based on its constituents — wooden handle, heavy cast iron head — maybe even infer its function and use from the way it’s shaped. The hammer is present-at-hand.
Magic happens when we pick up the hammer:
As soon as the hammer is in my hand, when I use the hammer to drive a nail into the wall, I do not think about which angle to hold my hand to manipulate the hammer — I think about how to hold the hammer to manipulate the nail. The hammer becomes almost invisible to me, it transitions from being an object in the world to a way of interacting with the world through it. Same thing happens when I use a pen to write or a computer mouse to point to things. I won’t think about how to move my hand on the trackpad, I think about how to move the cursor on the screen. When driving a car, I don’t think about how to twist my elbows to turn the steering wheel, I just think about where I want to go. The tool becomes part of my body in that way; I interact with the world through the tool now.
That’s what Heidegger calls ready-to-hand. Only when the hammer is ready-to-hand it becomes a means of action, rather than a subject of it, only then can we achieve some fluidity of using it. When the hammer breaks, it immediately loses its readiness-to-hand and becomes merely present-at-hand, our attention will immediately shift back from what we’re trying to hammer to the hammer itself.
What we’ve seen so far two examples here of how our experience of a tool can shift from the tool itself to what we’re perceiving through the tool (In Sartre’s case) or (in Heidegger’s example) manipulating through the tool and back.
The interesting part is this transition. Moments ago the hammer was a distinct thing, an ontologically discrete entity lying there in the outside world. And as soon as I pick it up, it becomes part of me. I use it as naturally as my own hands. The boundary between “me” and the “world” shifts — now the hammer is part of me, and ceases to be part of the “outside” world.
Remember Affordances?
Designers love to talk about affordances.The flat surface of a chair affords sitting on it. The little shadow under a button affords clicking on it. Affordances are action possibilities. Here’s what James Gibson had to say about hammers:
“When in use, a tool is a sort of extension of the hand, almost an attachment to it or part of the user’s own body, and thus no longer a part of the environment of the user. But when not in use the tool is simply a detached object of the environment, graspable and portable, to be sure, but nevertheless external to the observer. This capacity to attach something to the body suggests that the boundary between the animal and the environment is not fixed at the surface of the skin but can shift. More generally it suggests that the absolute duality of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ is false. When we consider the affordances of things, we escape this philosophical dichotomy.”
Before Gibson, the mainstream view of perception was that there’s an outside object, the subjective observer, and some internal representation of the observer object. But that model can’t explain what happens when tools become extensions of our bodies.
Tackling this problem of perception was central to Gibson’s work when he came up with it in 1977, but has unfortunately got lost a bit when affordances entered mainstream design lingo.
So originally, affordances were meant to be an answer to this philosophical conundrum, not something to be lightly tossed at wireframes as a fancy way of saying “can you make this button pop a little more?”
I promised you cyborgs. Here’s a cliffhanger.
In this post, I demonstrated that when we inspect our own experiences of tool use, we can see that tools become part of our body. I also talked about some of the philosophical frameworks to explain that. But how do we know this is true and not just something some crackhead philosophers made up in their cozy leather armchairs on a particularly scotch-fuelled night?
Stay tuned for next week, where I’ll present some fantastic results from neuroscience studies that show what is going on in the brain while we use tools. Oh, and will also say that this means that we are, in fact, natural-born cyborgs.
