Trying to be Calm:

Ubiquity, Cognitivism, and Embodiment

Simon Penny
Forthcoming in Throughout.
MIT Press 2010/2011.
Ekman and Hansen, eds.

Introduction
Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown proposed a ʻcalmʼ backgrounded
technology as a reaction to the laborious and foregrounded nature of ʻ90s
computer systems and the techno-fetishism exemplified by mid 90ʼs Virtual
Reality (Weiser and Seely Brown, 1995). This paper traces discursive and
technological transitions between the decade of ʻvirtualityʼ (1990s) and the
decade of ubiquity (2000s). The paper proposes that the notion of virtuality
was in part a product of an incomplete technology. The paper outlines the role
of the cognitivist paradigm in shaping notions of computation and virtuality
through the 90s and draws attention to the increasing importance of
discourses of embodiment in both HCI and media arts since the early 90s. The
key role of media artists in proposing and developing new modalities of
embodied interaction is observed. Two quite different classes of technology
which are often grouped under the rubric of ʻubiquitous computingʼ are
distinguished. It is argued that the ongoing paradigm shift toward embodied
and performative cognitive perspectives is critical to resolving theoretical and
(interaction) design challenges inherent in the development of ubiquitous
technology.

After Virtuality
I propose that discourses of technological ʻvirtualityʼ during the 1990s are
attributable in large part to the vestigal condition of interface technologies
during that decade, a condition which was theoretically supported by the
prevailing cogntivism. In their new roles as interactive multimedia systems,
computers were inadequately supplied with interfaces to the physical world –
the previously ʻnormalʼ roles of computers did not call for such interfaces. This
disjunction between comparative sophistication of computational capabilities
and the relative paucity of interface capabilities led, I would argue, to the
notion of the (computational) virtual, and the confused rhetorics of virtuality. In
hindsight we might say that the 90ʼs furor around the ʻvirtualʼ was symptomatic
of this technological imbalance, that much of the research work and grass-
roots development of the 90ʼs was directed at correcting that imbalance, and
that the current era of ubicomp evidences the effectiveness of that correction.

The 1990ʼs saw an explosion of creative research in interactive and immersive

art, catalysed by increasing availability of domestic and prosumer computer-
based media technologies, and fueled by burgeoning rhetorics of
cyberculture. The realm of the arts was a highly charged vortex for this work as
the traditional commitment to material immediacy and finely crafted sensorial
effect abruptly confronted a technology framed as abstract immaterial
manipulation of information. Over that decade, media arts practitioners played
a key and vigorous role in diagnosing, imagining and developing interface
technologies and new modalities of engagement. Capabilities of real time
interaction and databasing made questions of the aesthetics of (hyper)
narrative and of embodied experience of the digital central. A desire to
reconcile the sensibilities of arts practices and the capabilities and constraints
of emerging computational media technologies, was as important as an
exploration of the potential of the new technologies themselves. It was a
radically interdisciplinary moment, bringing together artists, computer
scientists, critical and media theorists and others, and driven by the traditions
of open intellectual inquiry and interdisciplinarity in the Arts and the previous
thirty years of ʻart and technologyʼ practice.

El bal de Fanalet/ Lightpools. Naric Pares, Roc Pares and Perry Hoberman, 1998. El bal de
Fanalet/ Lightpools combined sonar-based tracking and interactive artificial life-based
graphics with artifacts derived from Catalan popular culture.

The transition from the period of virtuality to the period of ubiquity was a result
of the maturation of interface technologies absent from the technological
palette of the 90s. Since then a variety of technologies linking the dataworld
with the lived physical world: sensing and tracking technologies (such as
MEMS accelerometers, machine vision, laserscanners, GPS, RFID) and
mobile communications technologies have been developed and deployed.
This has had the effect of nesting the ʻvirtualʼ back into the lived physical world,
revealing it to be a panic around an explosive and messy technological
transition period. This belated integration of data with the world caused ʻthe
Virtualʼ to evaporate. The transition from VR to more nuanced augmented and
mixed-reality modes deploying VRʼs stock-in-trade tracking and simulation
techniques indicates that ubiquitous computing is less the kind of antithesis of
VR which Weiser envisaged, and more of a continuity.

Petit Mal - Autonomous Robotic Artwork. Simon Penny, 1993-95. Shown here in the Smile
Machines Exhibition (curator Anne-Marie Duguet), Transmediale 2006, Berlin.

At the same time that human computer interaction moved out beyond the
research lab, human interaction with the world and with technology was
addressed more intensively – as is evidenced by the rapid expansion of HCI,
CSCW and related areas of research. HCI became increasingly
interdisciplinary as psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists became
involved. As recognition of the shortcomings of the cognitivist paradigm
became more widespread, new modes of cognitive science grappled with the
embodied, enactive, situated and social dimensions of cognition (Varela,
Thompson and Rosch, Suchman, Hutchins). Neuroscience research revealed
new dimensions of the mind-body relation (Edelman, Ramachanran, Sacks,
etc). Conventional philosophy of mind has been challenged on these bases by
Lakoff and Johnson, Clark, Thompson and others. This movement met media
artists coming the other way, as it were – exploring the application of
computational technologies to embodied, material and situated cultural
practices. The crafting of embodied, sensorial experience is a fundamental
expertise of the arts, an expertise which is as old as human culture itself.
Various topics of critical discourse which had been lumped-in with discussion
of the virtual have persisted, and in particular, it has become clear that many of
the aesthetic projects of ʻmedia-artistsʼ are inherently concerned with the
central issues of ubiquity.
Ubiquity : figure and ground
Mark Weiser, John Seely Brown and others made clear their motivations for a
ʻcalm technologyʼ that recedes from attention, but the term ʻUbiquitous
computingʼ is applied to two quite different types of technology. One is
industrial and embedded, effectively invisible and accessed by experts. The
other is consumer commodity, very visible and demanding of attention, while
nonetheless affording sophisticated data-gathering available to paying
customers. Although the two categories have much in common
technologically, they are very different in their relation to the social.

Intelligent buildings, augmented spaces and complex machines, as well as

communications networks themselves involve distributed and networked
ʻembeddedʼ technologies composed of small, low power units – in practice
invisible, with no (immediate) human interface - no screen, no keyboards
(perhaps an LED). These systems have been integrated into existing
technologies, edging them a little further along the mechanically causal -
homeostatic - adaptive trajectory, quasi-organisms with digital nervous
systems. Cars, planes, refineries, hospitals, bridges, utility infrastructures,
seismic faultlines and national borders are now increasingly digitally
instrumented. Engines run a little smoother and cleaner, industrial workplaces
have fewer workers and fewer accidents due to human error, illegal
immigrants are intercepted more efficiently.

In consumer goods, the obsession with the interface does not seem to have
abated, the ecstasy of computation - if not the ecstasy of communication -
seems to have become a fixture of popular culture. While miniaturisation and
wireless networking have indeed moved ʻout into the physical worldʼ, it has not
resulted in ʻrepositioning it in the environmental backgroundʼ (Ekman, this
volume). Rather, the miniaturised but intensified interface, attention
demanding and insistent, is foregrounded. While the technological
infrastructure (cell phone reception, etc) has indeed become ubiquitous, on
the level of human experience, many technologies reinforce a discontinuity
between the dataworld and the physical world.
Mobile wireless technology has certainly become ubiquitous, but perhaps not
in the way Weiser hoped. These words ʻubiquitousʼ, ʻpervasiveʼ, ʻembeddedʼ
all have an ominous ring, they carry negative connotations of an oppressive
informational monoculture or monopolistic order, perhaps because of their
deployment in military jargon. While the technical modalities of the technology
are novel, the purposes to which they are put retain functions of surveillance
and control. It is not just a question of to what ends the technology is deployed
and whom it is working for or against, but of to whom the systems are visible
and to whom they are invisible.

Skeuemorphs Rule, OK?

David Mindell reminds us: “Our computers retain traces of earlier technologies,
from telephones and mechanical analogs to directorscopes and tracking to
radars.” (Mindell 321) The physical conformation and functionality of the
machine we use is determined by the history of technologies from which it
arose. Interactive multimedia, we must recall, is the child of Cold War
computing research. The SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) system
put soldiers with keyboards and lightpens in front of monitors, to accomplish
the complex pattern recognition functions which the system could not
autonomously achieve. This constellation of technologies was the model for
the keyboard-mouse-monitor paradigm. The fact that this harnessing of flesh to
machine was later clad in the rhetoric of liberation in the heyday of interactive
multimedia remains deeply ironic.

Why did the computer, which once was a basement sized machine staffed by
attendants, morph into a desktop machine? The historical answer is that it was
applied the kinds of tasks which people who sit at desks do when sitting at
desks. Functionally, the desktop computer was an enhanced typewriter and
calculator with added filing-cabinet functionality. It follows then that it is
particularly useful and relevant for activities which resemble office desk
activities, such as record management, accountancy and letter writing, and is
decreasingly appropriate for activities whose social and architectural
placement diverges from that scenario. Many human activities, including
cultural and artmaking activities, do not resemble office work in their physical
contexts, methodologies or goals.

For the last generation, we have managed with computer technology which,
for all its touted user-friendliness, has continued to demand that we
preprocess our thoughts and experiences into a kind of keystroke mush which
is easily amenable to the limited a-d capability of these machines. If we are to
pursue the fundamental goals of Weiserʼs ubiquity, it means developing
computational technology past the stage that we and it appear to have got co-
dependently stuck in - tolerating a technology which must be spoon-fed with
little alphanumeric streams. Mercifully, after thirty years of personal computing
I no longer have to always position myself in work-position at my work-station,
from which I cannot move even a few feet without breaking my connection with
the machine by losing contact with screen and keyboard. But why, having
finally freed ourselves from the bondage of the desktop, do we tolerate having
to poke unidigitally at a miniature QWERTY on our mobile devices? What a
profound failure of imagination!

Trying to Be Calm
There is a significant difference between enhancing the control systems of
existing machine complexes and the enmeshing of computational processes
with human cultural and biological processes. Iʼve distinguished between, on
the one hand, clandestine, faceless technologies which involve distributed
units in a larger control array which itself is embedded in a larger machine
complex; and on the other hand, garrulous, clingy technologies close to the
body. Neither of these seems particularly calm. Beyond embedded
miniaturization (microcontrollers), location (tracking) and transmission (internet
and wireless communication), how far have we come along the trajectory to
calmness? Is automated processing of logical operations is necessarily
applicable and an asset in every aspect of life? Are there aspects of our lives
where digital intrusion might be utterly undesirable? (Do I need ʻblueteethʼ that
notify my dentist directly when they sense decay? Probably not. I certainly
donʼt feel the need for pop-up ads on the periphery of my vision when Iʼm
wearing my sunglasses.) To ask this question is to challenge the marketing
rhetoric of the computer industry, to challenge the assumption of the
desirability of the intrusion of computation everywhere: that automated
processing of logical operations is necessarily applicable and an asset in
every aspect of life. Computation is not value-free cognitive bedrock. There is
nothing ʻneutralʼ about the culture of computation, even if we are naturalized to
it.

While such issues are not necessarily foregrounded in everyday use of

consumer devices, we should review the aspirations of ubi-comp and its
current implementations, and consider the desirability of the current trajectory.
In what more or less subtle or insidious ways does the bending of human
activities to the needs of a not entirely calm technology stain or perturb the
richness of those practices? I am thinking here of skilled embodied practices in
particular; practices which have developed organically over generations,
subtly adapted to the complex richness of human formation, where artifacts
have co-evolved in ways which adapt and optimize subtleties of human
sensori-motoric capabilities, which may never have been, nor have had to be,
made explicit. Consider two examples, one high, one low: the culture of the
violin and the culture of the household kitchen. What makes a Stradivarius so
much more of a violin than a cigar box with a rubber band stretched over it?
The special quality of such an instrument is that it has been formed through an
extended period of interplay between artisans and players. A history of co-
evolution between the material specificities of the artifact and the repertoire, an
increasingly refined atunement between the embodied intelligences of the
artisan and the musician. A Kitchen likewise evolves as a workplace through
use - chains of intuitive design tweaks - a subtle interplay between the
ingredients, artifacts and procedures of specific cuisines, spatial layouts and
the physical capabilities of its users.

In such contexts the application of digital technologies almost always has the
effect of ʻthinning outʼ the experience in question, and this is due in part to a
preoccupation with problem-solving on the symbolic plane and the ensuing
elision of the situated, embodied action. This syndrome maps onto imperatives
of computer engineering – modularity/reductivism, standardization/generality,
optimality/efficiency – instrumentality generally. These criteria are valid in their
ʻhome territoryʼ – I want my laptop battery to have maximum life, I want my file
to be compatible, I do not want anyone taking aesthetic liberties with the shape
of an airplane wing. But the validity of these criteria wanes as they are applied

in territories further from home. Optimisation of King Lear or Beethovenʼs 5th

by elimination of redundancy is an inherently ludicrous proposition.

The Profundity of Material Being

The term ʻHuman factorsʼ speaks volumes about the engineering mindset - as
if the qualities of human embodiment were peripheral, ʻimplementation
detailsʼ. This is veiled cognitivitism, in the sense that thinking is conceived of
as abstract symbol manipulation and is taken to be an end in itself, rather than
part of the process of ongoing lived being. Combined with a rather Victorian
characterization of human perception and action, inflected with dualism, serial
processing (input-output) and cognitivism informs much computational
thinking. The crisis of the cognitivist model, (heralded, ironically, by the
faltering of Artificial Intelligence) led to renewed attention to embodied,
situated and material aspects of cognition. This new cognitive science is
immediately relevant to the still-vexed ʻhuman factorsʼ aspect of ubiquitous
computing, precisely because it addresses aspects of human experience
pertinent to the development of richer and more subtle, if not calmer
technologies of interaction.

Escape from the cognitivist cul-de-sac demands a wholesale paradigm-shift

and a new set of axiomatic assumptions: mind and body are not separate or
separable; self and world is likewise an invidious distinction; intelligence is
making sense of the world; thinking occurs at the fingertips and in the soles of
the feet, in the process of interaction with the world. Calm, embedded, context
aware technology implies a phenomenological understanding of being-in-the-
world, or, rather of a performative ʻdoing-in-the- worldʼ, of situated sensori-
motor action. Coming to understand the emergence of meaning through a
temporal process of bodily interaction with things and people in the world is to
engage what Andy Pickering has called The Mangle of Practice (1995). In this
work, Pickering captures a key aspect of the paradigm shift I am arguing for in
his distinction between what he called the representational idiom and the
performative idiom. In these terms, the cognitivist paradigm is firmly rooted in
the representational idiom. I propose that the pursuit of ubiquity demands a
post-cognitivist approach attending to embodiment, to the performative relation
to artifacts and the world, and to the relation of cognition to social and cultural
formations. In what follows, I give an introduction to such perspectives via a
discussion of the work of Edwin Hutchins.

Cognition Distributed and Embodied

In 1995, Edwin Hutchins published a remarkable work of interdisciplinary
scholarship which combined anthropological field work with cognitive science
and computational theory. He analysed the group activity of navigation on a
ships bridge as a case of ʻdistributed cognition,ʼ in which a group of people
performing specific roles and communicating to each other in specific ways,
using a highly developed set of tools perform computational tasks. In a more
recent paper,“Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things”, Hutchins makes some
remarkable observations on cognition in the wild, which warrant quotation at
length:
“In the last chapter of cognition in the wild … I argue that cognitive
science made a fundamental category error when it mistook the
properties of a person in interaction with a social and material world for
the cognitive properties of whatever is inside the person. One enduring
problem with this claim is that it demands a description of how cognitive
properties arise from the interaction of person with social and material
world. Cognition in the Wild provides a profoundly incomplete answer to
this question…For the most part, the cognitive processes described in
Cognition in the Wild, and in other treatments of distributed cognition,
are presented without reference to the role of the body in thinking. That
is, in spite of the fact that distributed cognition claims that the interaction
of people with things is a central phenomenon of cognition, the
approach has remained oddly disembodied.” (Hutchins)
I want to dwell upon Hutchinsʼ laudable self-criticism because is it a useful
example of the slow process of de-naturalising axiomatic assumptions (in
general and) in cognitive science, and is exemplary of the paradigm shift
which is occurring in cognitive studies. Cognition in the Wild can be read as an
attempt to recuperate a functioning and historically coherent system to
computationalism. As Philip agre puts it: “A computer… does not simply have
an instrumental use in a given site of practice; the computer is frequently about
that site in its very design. In this sense computing has been constituted as a
kind of imperialism; it aims to reinvent virtually every other site of practice in its
own image” (Agre 2003). When Hutchins translates one activity into the terms
of another, explaining navigation in terms of computation; the authority of this
translation is given by the (presumed) authority of the discourse of
computation. The ability of the crew, their training and process, tools and
artifacts, was demonstrably effective long before computational explanation –
recall that the expressed purpose of Babbageʼs difference engine was to
calculate tide tables for the British navy – aids to precisely the kind of
navigation Hutchins observed.

In what way and for whom did Cognition in the Wild ʻexplainʼ the procedures of
coastal navigation, or to put it another way: what is the power of the
computational explanation? An unreconstructed computational explanation
would necessarily explain observed phemonema in functionalist terms
(Putnam 1967- since recanted). Functionalism asserts that a mental state is
constituted by the causal relations that it bears to sensory inputs, behavioral
outputs and other mental states. Cognitivism is just one (computational)
version of functionalism. Functionalism has a rather industrial if not von
Neumannesque cast in its reliance on the idea of serial processing, inputs and
outputs. The cognitivism of Cognition in the Wild is more nuanced. Cognition,
for Hutchins, is embedded in artifacts and practices and shared among actors
– but it is still understood as computation. As cognitive science reaches out
further and further into cultural realms where computation is an increasingly
alien concept, distinctions between technical and popular usages become
increasingly hazy, the imperializing project of computer culture insidiously
persists.

Hutchinsʼ recognition that “Interactions between the body and cultural artifacts
constitute an important form of thinking. These interactions are not taken as
ʻindicationsʼ of invisible mental processes, rather they are taken as the thinking
processes themselves” (Hutchins, 2006) are reminiscent of remarks made by
Hubert Dreyfus many years earlier in his phenomenological critique of AI: “My
personal plans and my memories are inscribed in the things around me just as
are the public goals of men in general.” (Dreyfus, 1992, 266) More recently
John Sutton has similarly noted that “…thought is not an inner realm behind
practical skill, but itself an intrinsic and worldly aspect of real-time engagement
with the tricky material and social world.” (Sutton 2008, 50) To permit that
bodily motion may constitute the medium of thinking itself is a radical assertion
for a rehabilitated cognitivist, but will come as no surprise to the dancer or
practitioner of martial arts, nor to any thoughtful person while rock climbing or
hanging out the laundry. But we must not underestimate the profundity of this
sea-change in cognitive science, it indicates a hard-won emancipation from
naturalization to the tenets of AI. Philip Agre lucidly documents his won such
emanciption. He credits his reading of Foucaultʼs The Archeology of
Knowledge specifically and poststructural writing generally as an epiphany:
“…they were utterly practical instruments by which I first became able to think
clearly and to comprehend ideas that had not been hollowed out through the
false precision of formalism.” (Agre 1997, “Towards a Critical Technical

Practice.”).

It is precisely this ʻfalse precision of formalismʼ that hollows-out embodied

knowledge.
As Aldous Huxley observed long ago, “[i]n a world where education is
predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay
serious attention to anything but words and notions.” Numerous students of
embodied cognition, from Michael Polyani to Evan Thompson, have stated
what practitioners and teachers of embodied cultures have always known: the
skills of bodily know-how are notoriously hard to document: such thinking is
inherently non textual and non-intersecting with textual representation and
text-based reasoning. Dreyfus, after Polyani, refers to such knowledge as
“muscular gestalts.” (249) John Sutton notes in regard to the skill of the potter:
“Because this kind of expertise relies on an immense reservoir of practical skill
memory, embodied somehow in the fibres (sic) and in the sedimented ability to
sequence technical gestures appropriately, verbal descriptions of it (by either
actors or observers) will be inadequate…what the expert remembers is in
large part consciously inaccessible as well as linguistically
inarticulable.” (Sutton, 2008, 49) Philip Agre puts the complementary point
when he observes that computational fields “concentrate on the aspects of
representation that writing normally captures. As a result, theories will naturally
tend to lean on distinctions that writing captures and not on the many
distinctions that it doesnʼt.” (Agre 2003, 290) It is precisely this discontinuity
which creates a deep tension in the modern academy between the pedagogy
of the textuo-symbolic regime and the pedagogy of the arts and other
embodied practices – accounting for the failure of interdisciplinarity noted
above.

Such (embodied) thinking is not computational in the usual sense, so any

attempt to recuperate it to the world of computation has to force it through
several transmogrifications to fit a linear, atemporal, Boolean mode of
representation. The framing of group performance on a ships navigation
bridge as distributed computation in a computational-cognitivist world-view
was a tour de force by Hutchins. Yet, as he himself notes, the bodily
dimensions of thinking such analysis rendered irrelevant or invisible:
The processes that underlie the ʻAha!ʼ insight remain invisible to a
computational perspective in part because that perspective represents
everything in a single mono-modal (or even a-modal) system. A careful
examination of the way the body engages the tools in the setting,
however, helps solve the mystery of how the discovery was made, and
why it happened when it did. The insight was achieved in and emerged
out of the navigators bodily engagement with the tool. (Hutchins, 2006)

Hutchins comes close to the work of Mark Johnson (1987) and also Lakoff and
Johnson (1999) regarding the origins of abstract concepts in embodied
experience when he notes: “Motion in space acquires conceptual meaning
and reasoning can be performed by moving the body.” (Hutchins, 2006) Here
is revealed a fundamental cognitive cauterisation amongst all but the most
sensitively designed interfaces and interactive systems – a situation which has
beleaguered digital arts practices: they ignore and erase bodily engagement
of the sort that complement material artefacts and tools developed over years
or generations and which, taken together, facilitate bodily reasoning. The
navigators hoey, the engineers slide rule, the machinists caliper, the
carpenters square, are amenable to computational explanation, because
(loosely) what is involved is a relatively simple translation of geometry to
algebra. The painters brush, the violinists bow, the harvesters scythe, and so
many other artefacts, are complex and sophisticated devices for thinking with
because they have evolved in a deep structural coupling with the basic
rhythms and modalities of neural circuits and sensori-motor loops. They are
prosthetics which integrate with the user at a deep and more organic level
precisely because they do not involve a translation into and out of
mathematico-logical computation. On the subject of artifacts, Hutchins notes:
“By interacting with particular kinds of cultural things, we can produce complex
cognitive accomplishments while employing simple cognitive
processes.” (Hutchins 2006) Aspects of the environment are deployed as off-
board memory, and consistent with Hutchinsʼ notion of distributed cognition,
computation is offloaded too.

But are we not, in framing the situation in this way, reinstating precisely the
computationalist bifurcations we sought to avoid? Not simply of storage and
processing, but of the world and representation? Lambros Malafouris asserts
that it makes little sense to speak of one system representing the other:
“Although we may be well able to construct a mental representation of
anything in the world, the efficacy of material culture in the cognitive system
lies primarily in the fact that it makes it possible for the mind to operate without
having to do so, ie, to think through things, in action, without the need of
mental representation.” (Malafouris, 2004, 58) Micronesian canoeists gather
knowledge about undersea geography, colloquially ʻthrough the seat of their
pantsʼ (if theyʼre wearing any), but more accurately through a subtle integration
of proprioceptive and vestibular cues related to the movement of their craft
(canoe, catamaran) as a prosthetic extension of their embodiment. Hutchins
goes on rightly to observe: “From the perspective of formal representation of
the task, the means by which the tools are manipulated by the body appear as
mere implementation details.” (Hutchins, 2006)

The phrase “implementation details” tells the score before the game begins. It
belies a commitment to dualism that will automatically render invisible or
irrelevant aspects of embodiment. Explanation of a group human activity in
terms of computation will inevitably render invisible the significance of
embodied practice because the irrelevance of embodiment is axiomatic to the
rationale of the discipline. “Implementation details” is a phrase which stands in
for an entire corpus of disciplinary rationalizations to justify the disembodiment
of AI, as first articulated by Herbert Simon: “Instead of trying to consider the
ʻwhole manʼ, fully equipped with glands and viscera, I should like to limit my
discussion to Homo Sapiens, ʻthinking man.ʼ” (Simon 1969, 65) This arbitrary
and convenient ʻlimitʼ in the ʻroot documentʼ of cogntivism is a veritable
Pandoras box, which permitted the excision of embodied situated materiality
from AI and cognitive science for a generation. The devil is not so much in the
(implementation) details as in the desire to ignore them. “Implementation
details” cannot be swept under the rug. Like ʻhuman factorsʼ, the term has
allowed technical community to sidestep the overarching importance of human
culture – engagement of which would of course demand a challenging
interdisciplinarity which always has the awkward potential of destabilizing
axiomatic assumptions.

Conclusion.
Two decades ago, at the emergence of the ʻreactive roboticsʼ movement,
Rodney Brooks critiqued the reigning representationalism in his pithy
assertion that: “the world is its own best model,” (Brooks 1991, 15) a sentiment
which was sympathetic to emerging paradigms of embodied, situated and
distributed cognition, and also with Hubert Dreyfusʼ phenomenological critique
of AI. By virtue of evolutionary selection, there is direct cognitive correlation
between the world and the bodily experience of it. This results in a kind of
(performative) knowledge and (non-)cogitation irreconcilable with the
cogntivist ʻphysical symbol system hypothesis.ʼ But it is this embodied, situated
knowledge which provides the basis for precisely such cogitation, and for
introspection. This is the lived solution to the symbol grounding problem.
(Harnad) This double - that the world is its own best model, and that there is
direct (non)cognitive correlation between the world and the bodily experience
of it - is the core of the post-cognitivist position. It is a true paradigm shift, which
must be thoroughly internalized if real progress is to be made in the
development of ʻcalmʼ technology.

The period of development of (ubiquitous/consumer/computer/digital)

technology in which it could be (and needed to be) developed in vacuo, in the
lab, is resoundingly over. It must now be considered for what it demonstrably
is, an integrated component of social and cultural fabric, like automobiles and
telephones. In my opinion, a rigorous engagement of post-cognitive
perspectives offers the prospect of new approaches to ʻcalmnessʼ, context
awareness, and other murky ʻhuman factorsʼ which have to date stymied the
project of ubiquity.

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