Haptic Heaven: Why touch screens rule

I was looking for a phone number on my rather old fashioned mobile phone. It is an LG Chocolate- reliable elegant looking, and functions well as a phone. Its additional features- camera, mp3 player and so on- don't get in the way too much. I realised, as I searched for a friend's phone number, that I was repeatedly trying to scroll the screen with my finger tip, rather than with the button. This was because of six months with an Ipod touch. My default for small screens is now "haptic".

This goes back to a vision from at least the Seventies, where computers as portrayed in the future would be controlled with gestures, and voice commands would replace textual input. Today, the Ipod touch, and now the IPad(a pad is a wad of paper, and I understand the critique from women that the name has mentrual connotations; a pad is also where I live; a pad is also a cushion that softens my fall; a pad is also a small keyboard) use an almost button- free system of control based on finger movement across the surface of a screen.

It is remarkable how fast that experience transfers. The ease of haptic inteerfaces, combined with their relative durability, due to the lack of moving parts and entry points for dust and moisture suggest they will become ubiquitous for control panels. The sole limitation is the panel requires a glass or potentially ceramic face to allow the capacitance system to track finger movement. However, bullet-proof glass could presumably do the job in public areas where abuse might be more of an issue.

What will it mean when gesture increasingly returns to human Computer interface. In a sense, we will be waving at a computer, rather than prodding it. more over, I think there is a difference between texting in instructions and data, as I am doing now, and using a series of gestures to achieve the same results. Think of how we might relate using a gesture such as a raised clenched fist to mean stop (watch any military drama with a movement-to-contact sequence for this gesture) as opposed to a verbal command to "wait here" or "stop". We are moving away from logos- the word- and into a more embodied relationship.

The situation is not one of either/or but a plenum between a completely subjective experience, say sensing the rise and fall of one's own chest in breathing, and the experience of reading a letter. The sensation of breathing must be one experienced by not only humans, but certainly all vertebrate animals. The context of meaning might well change for other species, but that requires a kind of communication that humans have yet to achieve with other animals. Our most abstract communication, with written words(or math- I will bracket that, for the moment) on the other hand requires an almost disembodied consideration of the intersubjectivity between myself and the other who wrote the letter.

What does it mean when we return so much to the body when we interact with machines, especially computers? But the ease with which one becomes accustomed to such interfaces sayssomething about thought, and embodiment- but I am not sure what that is...

Embodied brain

I saw a brief presentation yesterday by a computer science Phd, which asked the provocative question, Which is smarter a baby or a computer. The presentation was more an invitation for non-specialists to think about the problem. There were chemists, theologians, a professor from the design department and your truly wearing the duel hats of philosophy and art history.

the discussion ultimately found that the comparison wasn't apt, and that babies were good at learning and ultimately contextualising, whilst computers were good at processingwithin set perameters. However, the young scholar pointed out that computers were being taught to contextualise.

When I read this article it occured to me that we achieved this ability because our intelligence is embodied. The octopus can think because it's intelligence is much more embodied than just in it's brain. As we are trailing along the same swath of evolution, perhaps we should look at our nervous system as contributing much more to our abilities to think. Certainly, most people tend to notionally consider the nervous system as dumb sensors and control cables. But it would be easy to hypothesise that those feedback systems have greater influence than generally thought of. How much of our thinking goes on in our body, rather than being processed in the brain?

The idea of embodied experience tends to go to meaning, and Prof. Deb Roy refers to humans and "thinking" computers as meaning machines. How else do we find meaning without addressing a physical world? Does the decentralised nervous system of the octopus offers a variation on embodied intelligence somewhat different from our own?

In my own work, the issues of an embodied intelligence responding to an architectural environment(is that a redundant expression?), I look at the aesthetic response. This offers one sense of meaning, and it is certainly a visceral- embodied! - route to meaning. 

This offers a range of paths to consider the embodied subject in relation to architecture and the environment in general. I am especially hopeful that it opens out the subject specific discourse of scholars like Lucas Crawford in a way that can merge and interact with a scientifically rigourous discourse. Queering or "trans-ing" the hard sciences without reducing their explicative power.