Embodied Meaning Making: An Approach to Analyzing and Designing Ambient Media
Liang Tan · 2020
Embodied cognition believes that the interaction between body and environment plays a major role in understanding the world. Despite growing research interests in the experiential aspects in HCI, less work has been done on exploring approaches to designing meaningful experience in the context of ambient media. Building on embodied interaction and cognitive semantics, this paper proposes an embodied methodology to designing ambient media based on interpretive and empirical studies. We applied the approach to design and build an ambient media work Reading Door. Experiments were conducted to collect empirical data on participants’ experience. Thematic analysis indicates that interacting with an interactive ambient media facilitates constructing the embodied metaphor that maps from bodily action to conceptual meaning. The findings also show that the embodied approach offers useful guidance for designing meaningful experience with ambient media. Three design principles were proposed to strengthen the approach and expected to inform future studies.