ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to develop a broad framework for investigating the tightly integrated relationships between bodies and technological devices described as instances of interfacing. Common, everyday understandings of new technologies often see them as interfering with ‘natural’ human behaviours. While more sophisticated accounts of human-technology relations typified by André Leroi-Gourhan and Bernard Stiegler oppose this perspective with an argument that the human has always been produced through relationships with artefacts, their accounts nevertheless rely on a belief that tools constitute a special category of objects, our relationship with which pulls human beings out of a larger nature. Furthermore, a number of accounts of embodied relationships with technological devices contrast a direct, ‘natural’ relationship represented by the tool with later technologies that either render human engagement redundant or overwhelm intrinsic human capacities. Drawing on influential accounts of human-technology relations from figures such as Marx, Heidegger, Clark and Ihde, as well as recent research in a variety of disciplines including animal behaviour and neuroscience, an alternative position is elaborated, one that highlights the degree to which all human action and perception are produced collaboratively with environmental features, but in which certain kinds of objects and actions produce a particularly tight integration. The chapter then critically responds to the idea of the ‘natural user interface’ (NUI), a concept that has been influential in efforts to improve the usability of user interfaces. The NUI relies on an implicit belief that the human body is a fixed set of attributes and constraints around which technological systems must be engineered so as to maximise smooth functioning, but action with external objects always creates new human capacities for action and perception that hold the promise of more progressive and exploratory approaches to interaction.
