Three embodied dimensions of communication: Phenomenological lessons for and from the field of augmented and alternative communication technology

Abstract

In the last chapter, Janna van Grunsven, Caroline Bollen and Bouke van Balen show how the phenomenology of communication can inform the field of augmented or alternative communication technology (AAC-tech). AAC-tech is a set of technologies developed for people who are unable to use some of their bodily expressive resources due to congenital or acquired disability. This inability often makes it very difficult for those people to communicate. Developers of AAC-tech often take a cognitivist starting-point, thereby missing out on the subtle ways in which embodiment shapes communication. The phenomenological description of the lived experiences of these people offers a fruitful starting-point for recognizing the often forgotten embodied dimension of communication, and enables to formulate desiderata for how AAC-tech should be developed: AAC-tech should take into account (1) embodied address, (2) embodied enrichment, and (3) embodied diversity. Focusing on the lived experience of potential users of AAC-tech has, according to van Grunsven, Bollen, and van Balen, not only direct practical applications for technology development but also can inform phenomenology methodologically: focusing on a limit case as the one discussed in this chapter makes visible that communication takes place in a wide variety of ways and that it is not the task of the phenomenologist to lay bare a general or essential structure of communication that can be taken as a standard.