The Public Availability of Actions and Artefacts

摘要

This paper introduces and describes some concepts basic to a phenomenological understanding of human perception that is derived from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. His account of the lived experience of the embodied subject, as the basis of both our experience in our world and our agency in our actions within it, is consistent with the focus on designing CSCW technology for flexible use that underlies so much of the recent work on awareness. My aim is to approach a complex and difficult body of work from the perspective of technology design in order to extract from it some relevant insights and theoretical principles that may, in turn, extend our understanding of what the public availability of actions and artefacts means in virtual space and how it might be supported. For Merleau-Ponty perception is active, embodied and always generative of meaning. This paper prioritises the relations between awareness, perception and the public availability of actions and artefacts because the challenge for designers of awareness resources for shared virtual spaces is that if people are to be aware of anything, then it has to be explicitly made available to their perceptions within those virtual spaces.