The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction… Showing Possibilities To

O’Neill, S. (2008) Interactive Media: The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction. London: Springer-Verlag.

“The embodied phenomenological approach does much better at describing the way in which we inhabit our media-saturated environments. (…) Its weakness is that it does little to explain how we make the transition from acting and doing in the world to thinking, reflecting and imagining about things that may or may not yet exist in the world. The movement from doing to thinking and thinking back to doing is not entirely clear. The one piece missing here is a theory that concentrates on the role of the stuff in the world itself in terms of how it can signify what we mean when we manipulate it.” (pp43-44)

Annotation
O’Neill identifies that phenomenology’s weakness is in explanation. This reminded me of a 2011 tweet from Nico MacDonald (a commentator on design communication, facilitation, and research) where he quoted ex-BMW designer Chris Bangle’s provocative comment from a Creatives Morning lecture that “Designers are good at visualising possibilities but we are not showing possibilities to people” (MacDonald, 2011). This statement struck a chord as my current research is focused on how Visual Communication can and does help to reveal things “from concealment” (Palmer, 1969, p129) and this process falls within hermeneutic phenomenology. A fusion of Visual Communication and techniques of interpretative phenomenology can be adapted to reveal the structure of an experience, which can then be visually captured and interpreted as themes of an experience - in turn “showing possibilities to” interaction designers of how people experience interactions to aid the design of better interactions. This may go some way to reassure Bangle that design, especially Visual Communication, can contribute more than what is usually expected of a designer.

A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person… Criticism: No Clear Termination

LEONARD, V.W. (1994) A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person. In: P. BENNER (Ed.), Interpretive Phenomenology: Embodiment, Caring, and Ethics in Heath and Illness. Sage Publications, Inc. pp43-64

“The interpretive process is necessarily circular, moving back and forth between part and whole, and between the initial forestructure and what is being revealed in the data of the inquiry. (…) The interpretive process follows this part-whole strategy until the researcher is satisfied with the depth of his or her understanding. Thus the interpretive process has no clear termination.” (p57)

Annotation:
‘No clear termination’ is a point of criticism that hermeneutics encounters frequently. As the act of interpretation continues until the interpreter “is satisfied with the depth of his or her understanding” (p57), it is indeed dependent on the background that the interpreter has. 

The Aims of Interpretation… ars intelligendi and ars explicandi

HIRSCH, E.D. (1976) The Aims of Interpretation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

“From very early times the idea of interpretation has combined and, to some extent, confused two functions, the understanding of meaning and the explication of meaning. One of the earliest distinctions in hermeneutics discriminated between these two functions: the ars intelligendi, the art of understanding, and the ars explicandi, the art of explaining. Obviously, an interpreter must first construe or understand a meaning before he explains it to others. Nevertheless, it is useful to stick to the broad term ‘interpretation,’ which fuses the two functions, since they do go together whenever any interpretation is explicated. To focus on the prior activity, one can simply use the term ‘understanding.’” (p19)

 
Annotation:
Interpretation fuses two functions together: the understanding of meaning with the explication of meaning. In hermeneutics this has been identified as ars intelligendi (understanding) and ars explicandi (explaining). The two functions can sometimes be confused and interchanged so Hirsh urges that when the person interprets they first are trying to match what they sense with what they already know in order to first understand before and interpretation and explanation can begin. A subtle difference between understanding and interpretation as the latter results in a conclusive outcome. In comparison understanding is more passive than active. 

Holism without Skepticism… Scepticism

BOHMAN, J.F. (1991) Holism without Skepticism: Contexualism and the Limits of Interpretation. In: D.R. HILEY, J.F. BOHMAN, and R. SHUSTERMAN (Eds.) The Interpretive Turn. Cornell University Press. pp129-154

“Even if such norms of ‘completeness’ or the evidence of ‘things themselves’ exist, circularity at least makes it indeterminate how they should be applied in any given case: ‘correct’ interpretations are not produced by some standardized method, algorithm, or semantic theory.” (p137)

Annotation:
The nature of interpretation as understood within a holistic and phenomenological perspective acknowledges that a ‘correct’ interpretation cannot be produced by functionalist or deterministic hard science, as science is not suited to the explaining how humans process and experience the world. From a functionalist and deterministic perspective the hermeneutic methods are viewed at best with scepticism and at worst academic hostility. 

Guerilla Metaphysics… Criticism of Hermeneutics

HARMAN, G. (2007) Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Open Court Publishing Company.

“hermeneutics still ascribes to humans (and perhaps even to animals) an apparently miraculous power: the ability to convert the sheer impact of the world into pictures of simulacra of such impact. Humans still transcend the world and contemplate it, even if only partially, and this makes humans different in kind from mere paper, sand, or gold. It is still humans alone can perceive the world, and the philosophical gap between sentient and inanimate or object and appearance is still taken as a given.” (p#)

Annotation:
The criticism of hermeneutics here is that as it reveals the structure and personal interpretation of a human’s experience, it is only revealing a state of being that has always existed in humans. This is a pointless criticism as hermeneutic phenomenology seeks to reveal the meaning behind that said experience, and until the phenomenologists began this inquiry that state had never been addressed. Despite this Harman does ascribe to hermeneutics that its power is “the ability to convert the sheer impact of the world into pictures of simulacra” (p#) of the studied experience. This demonstrates the contribution that this methodology makes to understanding human experience within the world – to reveal the unrevealed.