How marking in dance constitutes thinking with the body

In dance, there is a practice called ‘marking’. When dancers mark, they execute a dance phrase in a simplified, schematic or abstracted form. Based on our interviews with professional dancers in the classical, modern, and contemporary traditions, it is fair to assume that most dancers mark in the normal course of rehearsal and practice. When marking, dancers use their body-in-motion to represent some aspect of the full-out phrase they are thinking about. Their stated reason for marking is that it saves energy, avoids strenuous movement such as jumps, and sometimes it facilitates review of specific aspects of a phrase, such as tempo, movement sequence, or intention, all without the mental and physical complexity involved in creating a phrase full-out. It facilitates real-time reflection

Embodied Cognition and the Magical Future of Interaction Design

The theory of embodied cognition can provide HCI practitioners and theorists with new ideas about interac-tion and new principles for better designs. I support this claim with four ideas about cognition: (1) interacting with tools changes the way we think and perceive – tools, when manipulated, are soon absorbed into the body schema, and this absorption leads to fundamental changes in the way we perceive and conceive of our environments; (2) we think with our bodies not just with our brains; (3) we know more by doing than by seeing – there are times when physically performing an activity is better than watching someone else perform the activity, even though our motor resonance system fires strongly during other person observa-tion; (4) there are times when we literally think with things. These four ideas have major implications for interaction design, especially the design of tangible, physical, context aware, and telepresence systems

Interactivity and thought

A shared tenet of embodied, embedded, situated and distributed cognition is that people make sense of things interactively. They run a simulation, they exchange words, often taking turns to change and steer the flow of interaction; they gesture, they handle or manipulate things, they write, sketch or model. Because the concept of interaction seems intuitive, and the phenomena so pervasive, researchers tend to use the term to do more work than they have time to explain. This symposium explores different ideas about the way interactivity is understood, and how it figures in thought processe