24 2 TheProblemsofDesign Table 2.2 Categorization of audiences Audience Definition Customer Aset of potential people based on segmentation variables such as demographic, geographic and psychographic criteria among others User People who have experience of use and generate knowledge with artefacts/products in a knowledge lifecycle Person People who intuitively interpret what is of value for their purposes in the current environment and seek balance in everyday activities Human People with the same evolutionary history and bodily structure and hence the same primitives for understanding information In everyday life, we encounter the embodiment notion, resting on the idea that the mind and the body, or cognition and action, are fundamentally associated in human experience. Following a perspective based in the ‘Experiential Realism’ of (Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999), we find that “human beings understand their experiences largely depending on basic, bodily interactions with physical environments, as well as on social and cultural interactions with other humans” (Waterworth et al. 2003, p. 137). All human beings draw on the same primitive experiences that cover our shared embodied knowledge evolved over thousands, even millions of years (Waterworth et al. 2003; Hosoe 2006). Humans are organisms who share the same evolutionary history and hence, bodily structures and potential for experiences. Because of this, they also share the same primitives for understanding information – which is the fundamentalprinciple underlying human-experientialdesign applied to interaction. Theplaceofthehumaninacategorizationofaudiencesis shown in Table 2.2. TheVirtual-Physical Dichotomy Since the ubiquitous GUI was introduced and became the standard paradigm in HCI, it has contributed enormously to the development of society, especially the way we work. Recently, we have witnessed the emergence of a wider variety of HCI technologies, such as those implemented within sensor-based gaming environments, handheld smart phones with more intuitive onscreen interfaces and orientation sensors, etc., and these are now gradually penetrating society. However, westill cannot effectively utilize our skills for manipulating physical objects to any great extent, even though that would improve the nature of interaction. Research work on tangible interaction has been mostly focusing on numerous but narrow activities such as the manipulation of building blocks or shaping models out of virtual/physical clay (Ishii 2008). Currently, we live in the physical world in which computers are distributed, with interaction windows onto the virtual world provided by the display, keyboard, and mouse, or touch-sensitive surface. It is not a surprising idea to combine in ‘the