[O]ur default way of interacting with the world isn’t by peering at screens. We respond to the environment, to what it offers us, in an automatic and intuitive way. In most everyday scenarios, we don’t see our things as things at all. We just use them: we see a hammer, and we grasp it. We see a rubber ball, and we squeeze it, or bounce it.
This was Heidegger’s insight, and it also motivates the enchanted objects thesis. The world presents itself, in the first instance, as ready to hand – as being available for use. We manoeuvre things with our bodies unthinkingly, performing immensely complicated calculations without even being aware of it.
The world is full of information that we access instinctively. But so far, this knowledge has been useless in the resolutely two-dimensional digital world. The challenge, and the opportunity, is to harness our knowledge of how real, graspable and bounceable things work, and use it to shape more meaningful, fulfilling, connected experiences. But how?