It Takes Two to OЯTHO: A Tabletop Action-Based Embodied Design for the Cartesian System

The OЯTHO exhibit, situated within the LivingLab at Copernicus Science Centre (CSC) in Warsaw, Poland, introduces visitors to the Cartesian principles of representing numerical data as points in a two-dimensional space—the coordinate system. This interactive tabletop digital exhibit takes the form of a collaborative two-player game where participants manually control a virtual ball’s x- and y-axis values, respectively, to navigate it through maze-like paths, with the objective of completing the course in the shortest time and with the fewest moves. An action-based embodied design, OЯTHO draws on: (1) the enactivist tenet that individuals’ cognitive structures emerge from recurring task-effective sensorimotor patterns discovered through explorative perceptuomotor activity; and (2) cognitive-anthropological theorizations of shared ontologies as emerging through multimodal social interaction to facilitate the coordinated enactment of joint action. We overview the exhibit’s theoretical underpinnings and design conjectures; detail design challenges particular to the museum context, both in terms of the institution’s civic mandate and in terms of attracting and sustaining user engagement; present the exhibit itself; and speculate on the typology of research projects centered on mixed-methods multimodal data analysis based on expected 70,000 annual users.