Chapter 2: Probing the Frame: Immersion is Not Interaction

There are two nearly parallel timelines that have led us to the current moment of possibility for creating an entirely new immersive medium. One obvious story line tells the familiar account of the birth of personal, networked and mobile computing, and the human–computer interaction (HCI) field, which shaped them. The other story covers the lesser known but equally important work done by various pioneers of psychology, family therapy, cognitive, and neuroscience who were fascinated by the richness and complexity of the phenomena of conscious intelligence, emotion, and the embodied human cognition. In the process of contrasting these diverse perspectives on such key concepts as decision-making, behavior, embodiment, emotion, and spatial cognition, I will attempt to show that the current boundaries delineating the existing HCI paradigm might not contain the sufficiently robust set of premises for tackling the novel immersion challenge. The critical and comparative analysis guiding this chapter follows Herbert Simon’s argument that all creative problem-solvers can be guided by an insight from mathematics, which exhibits in its conclusions what is already implicit in its premises. In other words, solutions which emerge from purposeful problem-solving activity should simply make evident the signals which were already present within the problem space but hidden in plain sight in the fog of noise and discombobulation. Simon’s precept highlights the critical importance of generating the essential premises at the problem statement stage. As this chapter attempts to show, the challenge of designing human+computer systems requires the core problem statement, which synthesizes premises covering the entire spectrum of the augmented intelligence from a variety of fields, including both the computer and social sciences. This task is vastly complicated by the fact that the agency guiding the behavior of human actors within socio-technical systems is less predictable and much more subjective than that of objects in the physical and computational realms. This chapter probes and contrasts the fundamental premises, the explicit, the implicit, the ontological, epistemological, axiological, and methodological assumptions guiding the HCI field in order to determine its contribution to the overall goal of human+computer immersion. In this task, I apply the critical research and hermeneutic approaches to bring together and review the literature covering what I consider the defining themes and events in the HCI field. Throughout this chapter I continue to critically engage with, and problematize, many widely accepted HCI concepts and commitments, which sometimes complement and sometimes contradict the user-centered vision of human+computer mind augmentation. I cover these established canonical works, thinkers, and projects, which have influenced the development of HCI, to set the stage for the discussion about the less examined and much harder to operationalize emotional, irrational, “shadowy regions that surround human consciousness.”¹ The coordination between both of these realms is a necessary task of assessing how ecologically sound immersive H+C networks could be designed.