Embodied cognition has emerged over the last decades as a new paradigm of the human reasoning system. Large numbers of researchers agree on the influences of perceptual and motor activity on our thinking and representational mechanisms. The importance of embodied mind theory is growing in the field of cognitive science. It is now the conceptual support for innovative projects in human computer interaction (HCI). The new paradigms of HCI are shifting towards the venue of natural, invisible and pervasive interfaces. Office tasks of the 80s and their related interfaces are now being replaced by multimodal commands (gesture, voice) and contextual or social inputs. From graphical user interfaces to tangible and multimodal devices, new sets of innovative interaction techniques are emerging and these can no longer rely on classic metaphors and visual analogies. To increase the meaning of new commands and representations of post-wimp interaction techniques and to build coherent and consistent metaphors between different platforms and embedded devices in our environment, researchers have turned their attention to the embodied vision of the cognitive system.We present in this thesis the embodied cognitive paradigm and how it has been adopted by the HCI community. We illustrate this model by analyzing several tasks carried out in heterogeneous environments. Thereafter, proposals are made on how museums, exhibitions and collaboration tools may use embodied metaphors as a design strategy to produce innovative multimedia devices. The first application was one of mediating access to a database of digitized 3D objects for the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Paris. In this project the digitized objects are displayed in a metaphor of fluids and particles managed by electromagnetic forces that guide the semantics of the user’s search. Browsing tasks in this catalog are intended to be clear and coherent between different platforms in order to respect the user’s levels of desired engagement. An analysis is made of the ability of metaphors to build bridges between the various platform interfaces. In the second application, metaphors related to the concept of visual depth and density was used to propose a 3D timeline so as to visualize temporal data. Finally, the framework synthesizes the embodied metaphorical mappings in a large set of components which will be applied as building blocks when prototyping interaction techniques. This structure takes the form of a conceptual Framework of interaction agents which might serve not only as a tool for prototyping interfaces but also as a catalyst for generating innovative ideas.
From metaphor to the task. A library of metaphorical concepts for the prototyping of technical interaction