Richard Shusterman

The idea to draw on pragmatist philosophy for the foundations of interaction design is a useful one, and Deweyan notions of aesthetic experience have inspired several writers on experience design and on the aesthetics of interaction. Shusterman, however, takes the philosophical framework to a whole new level. His book does a thorough job of delineating a pragmatist view of aesthetics and, most usefully, contrasts it in detail with analytic aesthetics and other approaches. It then moves on to illustrate how pragmatist aesthetics can inform analyses of not only "high art" but also pop-culture works such as contemporary rap music. The final chapter in the second edition addresses the role of bodily experience in aesthetics and outlines the discipline that Shusterman calls somaesthetics; something that should be highly relevant to any interaction design thinker working on tangible interfaces and other forms of embodied interaction.… (altro)