Digital Proxemics: How Technology Shapes the Ways We Move (Digital Formations Book 110)

space as a cultural marker of learned behavior. For Hall, proxemics was the study of the nonverbal use of space as a marker of culture.

A synopsis of the field of information design culminates in the shift in thinking from designing information to designing experiences.

charted the relationships between how people stood in space and field of vision, thermal awareness, volume of speech, ability to touch, linguistics, and other characteristics of interpersonal interaction. The result of these relationships became Hall’s classification of 4 major categories of space: intimate, personal, social, and public.

determinism. The viewpoint of architectural determinism suggests that the built environment is directly linked to the behavior that occurs in it. The choices we have in a built space—where to sit, how to move, how to interact with co-present others—are dictated by the physical structure.

This interaction might be described as a dialectic with the digital on one end and the physical on the other with our lives negotiating a balance between the two. Or, perhaps it might be described as two intertwined sources of information and knowledge.

the difficulty with this viewpoint is the extreme passivity it requires of actors in the environment.

The study of proxemics can investigate all of these things, but it is fundamentally focused on the behaviors of humans in relation to one another as they use and experience space.

proxemics will be defined as the study of space and the use of space in human interaction.

we need moments of pause that invite us all to learn about the ways our culture—and our use of space as a marker of culture—is changing in response to digital technologies.