The book is about the common thread between current developments in Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Collaborative Work: embodiment, which is a central underlying concept for tangible computing and social computing. Tangible computing refers to the distribution of computation across different devices in the physical environment, and are sensitive to their location and proximity to other devices and people. Social computing refers to the increasing attempt of understanding the social world for interactive system design. Both have in common the familiarity with the everyday world and the way we experience it, the facts that things are embedded in the world (which is physical but also a social context).

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