Gijs Huisman

A new year, which, given how here in the Netherlands we are smoothly sliding into another month of our current coronavirus lockdown, feels very much like the previous one. Some things have changed, though, as the previous post might have already hinted at. Last November I started as an assistant professor at the Human-Centered Design group’s Perceptual Intelligence lab (Pi-lab for short) at the Delft University of Technology.

In my new position, I will focus on haptic social interactions from an embodied cognition perspective. Recently, I have gotten interested in non-representational accounts of cognition and phenomenological philosophy. From this perspective there is a lot to be said about social interactions, and in particular, those that are mediated by some form of technology. I like to see this as a departure from the ‘traditional’ message-exchange paradigms of mediated communication that we have all gotten so (too?) familiar with through our use of smartphones and social media. My aim is to provide new insights into technology-mediated interactions that do justice to the fact that human beings are embodied beings.