Consider the Moon. Human-Computer Bricolage of Extended Objects

Abstract

Our minds are extended through tools – from pencils

on paper to clocks and computers. ‘Extended minds’

have gained acclaim in digital times, but have also

stirred fear: do objects become smarter at our

expense? We propose a new approach to help cultivate

auspicious cognitive relationships with things: the

‘extended object’. If our thoughts are extended through

things, things can be symmetrically and methodically

extended through our thoughts – in conversation, and

in time. Let us consider the Moon: Can it colonize us?

Author Keywords

Extended mind; Augmented reality; Extended object;

Digital collection; The Moon.

ACM Classification Keywords

H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g.,

HCI): Miscellaneous; K.3.0. Computers and education:

general.

Introduction

What is the Moon to you? What could it be?

Maybe you will answer, ‘The Moon is nothing to me, nor

do I wish to have anything to do with it. It is just a

large boulder anyway’. Or maybe you think, ‘The Moon

is wonderful as it is. I just don’t get to look at it

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. CHI'15 Extended Abstracts, April 18 - 23, 2015, Seoul, Republic of Korea Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-3146-3/15/04…$15.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702613.2732504.

Cosima Rughiniș

University of Bucharest

Schitu Măgureanu 9

Bucharest, Romania

cosima.rughinis@sas.unibuc.ro

Răzvan Rughiniș

University Politehnica of Bucharest

Splaiul Independenței 313

Bucharest, Romania

razvan.rughinis@cs.pub.ro

enough. I don’t want it to change’. In this case, please

bear with us with analytical detachment.

If, on the contrary, you feel that the Moon could

strengthen its presence in your life, that it could boost

its Moonliness somehow, then we invite you to go

through the steps of our exercise: a Prologue to

extending the Moon.

What is an extended Moon?

To make a long story tiny, let us start from the other

end of the equation: what is an ‘extended mind’?

The extended mind

The concept’s claim to fame originates in the work of

Andy Clark and David Chalmers [17], who argued that

cognition should not be understood as purely intra-

cranial: thoughts happen within and across the skull.

Extended cognition is an attempt to conceptualize the

strong coupling of our thoughts with material and non-

material tools – calculations made on paper, words that

flow between speakers, knots on a handkerchief,

microscopes-with-suddenly-visible-microbes and the

like. Extended cognition is part of a broader intellectual

movement challenging the cognitivist paradigm that

situates cognition in the individual mind and brain, in

analogy to a computer’s representational and

computational processes. It is related to theories of

embodied and situated cognition, which point to the

role of bodily experiences and here-and-now

interactions in cognitive events [54] [53]. The extended

mind belongs not to a brain but to a ‘person-plus’ [39],

an equipped actor that makes sense of the world

through her paraphernalia.

This gear needs not be digital. After all, extended

cognition marks the role of language, as well as the

importance of other objects as material symbols

[18,44] - from ancient writing devices to maps, clocks,

and typewriters. Tools are part and parcel of our

perception, memory, computation abilities, planning

and decision-making. Still, the advent of the Internet

and digital devices has clearly raised the salience of the

‘extended mind’ concept, since so much of our thinking

now happens on the screen, at the junction of our

questions and automatically summoned answers.

This ‘web-extended mind’ [50] has also stirred

apprehension. Nicholas Carr has asked, in so many

words, ‘Is Google making us stupid?’ [14,15]. His fear

is that our attention is thinning to a degree to which

deep thinking becomes impossible, transforming us in

perpetually distracted consumers of information

snippets. By delegating memory to external devices, he

argues, we risk our creativity; by delegating our ability

to sense what is important to alert systems and Google

maps, we become numb.

Many self-diagnosed highs and lows of the web-

extended minds can be explored in the 2010 debate

initiated by Edge.org, who asked 120 contributors from

creative fields its annual question: ‘How is the Internet

changing the way you think?’ [23]. To be sure, there

are lots of highs – as many scientists, journalists and

artists praise the riches of the connected ambient. Still,

a certain existential angst persists: are we becoming

too dependent on external devices for making sense of

the world [52]? Is the past slowly eluding us [51]? Do

we hurt our personhood by bleeding attention in a state

of ‘public dreaming’ [31]? Are we becoming alienated

from the world and from ourselves?

The augmented reality

The digital transformation is entangling our thoughts

with other people and machines. But physical reality is

also changed, gradually covered with layers of

information. ‘Augmented reality’ refers to an

environment in which observable objects are

accompanied by strata of added symbols that may

serve to transform, enrich or simplify the experience

[33]. In augmenting reality, we may mix different

orders of creativity – joining mundane objects with

factual information, complex models, or hand-drawn

goblins if we wish; integrating cities in a global

multiplayer game; adding dates, events and stories to

monuments - or introducing people through digitally

assembled profiles.

Still, one should keep in mind that all symbols are

created by somebody, be it human, nonhuman or

hybrid – and thus the augmented reality is, at the same

time, a labeled reality. Critics observe that the more

intimate and immediate these labels become, the less

are we mindful of their traces and the intentionality

which they carry [16]. We also become more isolated,

captive in our ‘filter bubble’ [38] that feeds us our own

preferences. We run thus the risk of being carried away

by the commercial and philosophical agendas of the

makers of augmented reality layers, loosening our

personal grasp of the world [15]. Alienation looms

again – or even more drastic forms of captivity [10].

The escape

Facing these risks, what are we to do? The answer

remains enigmatic.

One piece of the puzzle, favored by many thinkers on

this issue, is to stare away from the screen (such as in

Figure 1). While for most people there is no turning

back to pre-digital times, one way of tackling these

hazards consists in simply fleeing the devices, now and

then. Direct, personal contact with fellow humans,

nature, specific living beings, beloved things or books

may serve to balance the digital sensory overload and

to redress our abilities to navigate life and perceive the

world without automated intermediaries.

Another piece of the puzzle may be to rearrange our

habits of navigating digital worlds. In this line of

focusing intently on the screen, rather than away from

it, we propose an approach to enhance our relationship

with daily surroundings, to raise awareness of past and

present, and sharpen our attention amidst flows of

distracting stimuli. If we have become hunter-gatherers

of information [51], let us hunt and gather the

resources to digitally extend the objects which are

meaningful to us.

The extended object

We propose the concept of ‘extended objects’ as the

symmetrical counterpart of the extended mind. The

mind is extended through things, and things are

extended through thoughts.

We obtain extended objects methodically, by taking

regular things and (1) wrapping them in layers of

symbols, binding them stronger with our thought, (2) in

pursuit of a deeper understanding of their nature.

Following Sherry Turkle, they are ‘evocative objects’

rather than instruments [55] [56]; their cognitive value

is not strictly related to a certain operation, but comes

from their capacity to inspire us, to stimulate

connections, to kindle our silent or public dialogues.

Figure 2. In order to extend the

Moon, it goes without saying that

we should start by examining the

Moon itself. Go outside, or search

the web. This is Rob Pettengill’s

photo on Flickr [40]

Figure 1. Away from the screen:

‘Gazing at the Moon’, by

Alivepixel on Deviantart [1]

(1) Many things, big and small, familiar or strange, can

be evocative and can be deeply intertwined with our

thoughts. Extended objects are those things which we

have extensively enveloped, in time and through

multiple interactions, in personal layers of meaning.

They bear many memories of various events, from

what has happened to them, what we have told others

about them, what knowledge we came across and was

important enough to remember. If minds are extended

through material knowledge, things are extended

through mental thoughts: they stir in our heads those

very memories or impressions. Thus, objects are not

extended through texts that are affixed to them

somehow, glued, or printed on the bottom, or tied with

rope; objects are only extended through what we can

think about them with our minds – individually or

jointly. That is, objects are extended through whatever

thoughts they evoke in conversations - either silent,

internal dialogues, or interpersonal talk.

(2) Unlike augmented objects, which may take over

layers of symbols that are completely unrelated to their

previous functioning and existence (think adding a

fierce dragon fight above a museum entry), we extend

objects in order to grasp the features we deem

essential. Of course, there is no adding without

transformation. Still, unlike augmentation, which may

serve any purpose and often aims at radical

transformation, extending objects aims at

understanding: extended objects become better at

revealing themselves to thinkers. That is, they become

less familiar [3] and more talkative [47], with multiple

voices.

We can surely extend objects without a computer. For

example, we can extend scientific objects by examining

their social or fictional lives (for example, a theorem

[45], statistical significance [22] or ‘first impressions’

[28]). We can slightly extend a hallway mirror by re-

reading ‘Through the Looking Glass’ or ‘Snow White’.

Yet, in this article we discuss web-extended objects,

that is, things to which we carefully append symbols

gathered (or hunted?) in the digital realms. So, we can

extend our mirror by playing Telltale Games’ ‘The Wolf

Among Us’ (featuring a talking mirror), or installing a

malevolent mirror app. Indeed, do you ever wonder

how evil your mirror could be? There are apps to show,

like UglyBooth [41]. Do you ever feel that the mirror

diminishes, rather than reflects? Laura Williams’

photographs may somehow clarify this [11].

We extend objects by attentively attaching them

thoughts, and minding whether they stick. It is a work

of bricolage, in line with the maker culture – only it

involves symbols as raw materials. Since we talk about

digitally gathered stuff, we shall discuss human-

computer bricolage.

Extending an object takes time, as forms of knowledge

about that object have to be discovered, affixed,

stabilized through reflection and dialogue, removed

through forgetting, and all in all have to be continually

adjusted to its shape and functions. For our case study,

we shall only present some possible initial steps. In

what follows, we therefore introduce a Prologue for

extending the Moon through human-computer

bricolage.

Prologue for extending the Moon

Extending such a large celestial body takes some work

and quite a bit of time. We have segmented the

prologue into steps, with estimates of duration. Unless

Figure 3. Phases of the Moon.

Photo by Sandeep Gangadharan

on Flickr [27]

you really dislike our only natural satellite, you, Reader,

should necessarily follow some of the exercises. At

least, say, five of them. Come what may.

Preliminary steps

1. [2 min.] Add to your Google calendar the Phases of

the Moon (it comes under ‘More’). Alternatively, install

a mobile app indicating Moon phases. They are

surprisingly abundant. For what’s worth, 5 January

2015 (the alt.chi deadline) was Full Moon [32].

2. [2 min. today; 1 hour on 19 September] Add to your

calendar the International Observe the Moon Night, on

19 September 2015. When the day comes, go outside

and observe the Moon.

3. [5 min.] Read the lead paragraph from the Wikipedia

entry on the Moon [59].

Consider its poetry:

The Moon is not the largest satellite - just the largest

relative to the size of the object it orbits

The Moon is not the densest satellite - just the second

among those whose densities are known

The Moon is also not the brightest - just the second

among regularly visible celestial bodies in our sky

Although it can appear a very bright white, its surface

is actually dark, with a reflectance just slightly higher

than that of worn asphalt

The Moon may appear to be the same size as the Sun -

but this is just a coincidence!

The Moon is locked in synchronous rotation with Earth,

always showing us the same face

Slowly departing with 3.8 cm per year

The Moon is the result of a giant impact.

It is formed from debris.

4. [8 min.] See NASA’s Evolution of the Moon [34] and

Tour of the Moon [35], on YouTube.

5. [10 min.] Prepare your devices. Install a theme or a

background image featuring the Moon. For Android, try

Earth & Moon in HD Gyro 3D, by Alexander Kettler [29]

After becoming acquainted with the ambivalence of the

Moon, we can now examine its naked numbers.

Consider size and scale

6. [3 min.] What is the distance to the Moon? We have

just read about it on Wikipedia, but maybe we have

already forgotten it. It seems a perfect fact to be

delegated to the computer side of our hybrid memory.

Yet, for extending the Moon, we need to keep it in our

mind – and maybe in our hands, too. How far do people

think that the Moon is from the Earth - in terms of

tennis ball versus basketball? About as far as the young

woman shows in Figure 4 [57]. This is partly because

most illustrations are not to scale – including Figure 5

and your new Android theme, amongst others. The

Moon is, actually, quite far away.

7. [5 min.] Have you noticed that the Moon on the

horizon seems to loom larger than the Moon up in the

sky? It is the Moon Illusion, discussed since ancient

times, and it remains somewhat of a mystery. How

come there is no definitive answer?

Figure 5.Gravitational field of

Earth and Moon. Simulation by

J.Gabás Esteban on Flickr [25]

Figure 4. How far is the Moon?

Video by Veritassium on Youtube

8. [3 min.] But in the Universe, the Moon and the Earth

are just two neighboring dots. What if the Moon were

only a pixel [60]?

9. [10 min.] If we go towards the Moon, and then keep

going, it will, in time, become clear that the Universe is

big. For what’s worth, we may probe its scale [42], by

watching Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of ten, or

Nikon’s Universcale.

Consider the Moon people

10. [5 min.] We have swiftly traveled across billions of

years from Moon’s genesis to present time, but we did

not yet inquire into our human past. Hunting and

gathering digital information has mostly brought us

present-day facts, stories and theories. But the Moon

has been with us for quite a while. See a New York

Times slideshow introducing Bernd Brunner’s book

Moon: A Brief History [8].

11. [16 min.] We can travel through YouTube until

1902, and watch Georges Méliès’ silent film A trip to

the Moon.

12. [Another 16 min.] We can now see the later version

of the same film, colored by hand. Do you agree that

the Moonlight drains the colors of the world?

13. Watch a short video about The Moon Man [20] (or

rent and see the 2012 film The Moon Man), based on

Tomi Ungerer’s book.

14. [15 min.] Read Isaac Asimov’s brief story A

Tourist’s Guide to the Moon [2]. Now do you feel better

prepared?

15. [3 min.] Watch the video of Neil Armstrong in the

First Moon Landing.

16. [5 min.] Did we actually go to the Moon [48]?

17. [10 min.] How did public enthusiasm for Moon

travel wane? Read Joshua Rothman’s commentary on

the book ‘Marketing the Moon: The selling of the Apollo

Lunar Program’ [46].

18. [10 min.] If offered a opportunity, would you care

to buy a parcel of Moon land [24]?

Consider intimacy

If the mind is extended, so must be empathy [30] –

which makes the Moon an obvious piece of equipment

for extended affection. Gazing at the Moon has become

a tool of trade for love and friendship. Moon

connections to Sun and Earth have been reflected upon

through the lens of human sentiments, and vice-versa.

What does ‘tidal locking’ mean for you, now that you

think about it?

19. [10 min.] Play I am a brave knight [9] on Android.

Have you noticed the Moon? How many times?

20. [20 min.] Learn by heart a poem about the Moon.

It will become a trustworthy companion. We prefer

plain spoken poems – maybe you will enjoy Billy

Collins’ The four moon planet [19]?

21. [20 min.] Read Italo Calvino’s The Daughters of the

Moon [13], in The New Yorker.

Figure 6. Georges Méliès, Le

voyage dans la Lune

22. [20 min.] Read Italo Calvino’s The distance to the

Moon [12], and then watch the beautiful short film

[43].

23. [4 hours] Buy and play Freebird Games’ To the

Moon [26].

Consider sadness

24. [30 min.] Play Personal trip to the Moon [58] on

Kongregate.

Consider the power of the Moon

25. [10 min - 2 hours] Play the Lune game [6]. Isn’t

the Moon powerful?

Exiting the Prologue

[2 min, for now] Schedule in your Calendar a personal

time for extending the Moon. For example, at the

beginning of each new phase, allocate half an hour.

[Your choice] Listen to songs about the Moon (either by

looking up the NASA list of melodies [36], or by

listening to playlists on YouTube or Spotify).

[Several hours] Buy and read Brunner’s book [8].

[Your choice] Explore Pinterest collections about the

Moon and Moonliness. Assemble your own boards.

[Your choice] Experiment with Google ‘search poems’

[37] about the Moon, and send it to Google Poetics. So

far, not much – but one can never know when

collective questions aggregate insightfully.

[20 min] Relax. Play Full Moon [7] on Jayisgames.

A crash course

If you just skipped all links in blissful skimming across

the paper, you must now take the crash course in

extending the Moon:

Collins Calvino Asimov Morgans Lune

game 3 min 10 min 15 min At leisure 10 min

Figure 8. Crash course in extending the Moon. Images from

Galileo’s Moon drawings in Sidereus Nuncius.

You are now ready. You may begin in earnest to extend

the Moon.

Conclusions

By now, you have examined several Moons: an

astronomical Moon of stone, a Moon of fantasy and one

of science fiction, the Moon of scientists’ fascination

across ages, and the Moon of children. There is also a

Moon of eyesight - if you look outside. As a rule these

Moons remain distinct from one another, they do not

click into a single object at any given moment. By

methodically extending the Moon through careful

consideration, in due time, it is our hope that they will

all fall into place, bringing forth a Moon of many faces

and dimensions.

As it has emerged, extending an object involves

assembling, experiencing and commenting a personal

collection. We become curators for our extended,

evocative objects.

If we hunt and gather online, how can we store these

digital assortments? For an object to become evocative

Figure 7. ‘The distance from the

moon’, after Italo Calvino [49]

and talkative, it is best if it is already part of our

conversations. Each of the steps presented above can

be done alone or together, discussed in our inner forum

or in talk with others. Since intimate conversations are

one of the strongest adhesives of our socially

constructed reality [4,5] [21], the second version of

each pair will strengthen our extended objects.

Human-computer bricolage takes time. In order to

revisit now and then our symbolic elements that piece

together the extended Moon (or watch, mirror, fork,

bicycle), we may archive them on a platform of our

choice. For example, for the time being, the steps that

we have introduced in the Prologue are available on a

Pinterest board (‘Consider the Moon’). Prezi may allow

a better formatting for our article and its collection of

links. We welcome advice on improving and organizing

our miscellany.

Extending an object is foremost a work of rummaging,

as conventional search engines are virtually useless for

finding such idiosyncratic stuff. We search in the good

places in which we usually find things, and in other, not

so good places. There will be surprises. Will we pierce

the filter bubble?

Extending an object invites de-familiarizing oneself with

what was taken for granted, extending the time and

space of the object, merging its multiple versions, and

attending to its human company across ages. As things

become un-ordinary, they sparkle humor and poetry.

When not a primary focus of attention, extended

objects drift towards tacit inspiration and suggest silent

rhythms. Just like the Moon.

Acknowledgments

This article has been supported by the research project

“Sociological imagination and disciplinary orientation in

applied social research”, with the financial support of

ANCS / UEFISCDI with grant no. PN-II-RU-TE-2011-3-

0143, contract 14/28.10.2011.

References [1] Alivepixel. Gazing at the Moon. http://alivepixel.deviantart.com/art/Gazing-at-the-moon-94097926.

[2] Asimov, I. A Tourist’s Guide to the Moon. The New York Times, 1982. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-tourist.html.

[3] Bell, G., Blythe, M., and Sengers, P. Making by making strange: Defamiliarization and the design of domestic technologies. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 12, 2 (2005), 149–173.

[4] Berger, P. and Kellner, H. Marriage and the Construction of Reality. Diogenes 12, 1 (1964), 1–24.

[5] Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. 1966.

[6] Bodet, F., Bonneau, M., Carpentier, L., Chappuis, R., Mohov, S., and de la Garanderie, A.P. Lune. 2013. http://lunegame.com/.

[7] Bonte, B. Full Moon. Jayisgames. http://jayisgames.com/games/full-moon/.

[8] Brunner, B. Moon: A brief history. Yale University Press, 2011.

[9] Bulkypix. I am a brave knight. Google Play, 2014. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bulkypix.iamabraveknight&hl=en.

[10] Buttrick, L., Linehan, C., Kirman, B., and O’Hara, D. Fifty shades of CHI. Proceedings of CHI EA ’14, ACM Press (2014), 825–834.

Figure 9. To the Moon [26]

[11] Cade, D. Invisible: Laura Williams Talks About Her Surreal Self-Portrait that Went Viral. petapixel.com, 2014. http://petapixel.com/2014/02/24/invisible-laura-williams-talks-viral-surreal-self-portrait/.

[12] Calvino, I. The Distance of the Moon. 1976. http://www.aleastory.co.uk/The-Distance-of-the-Moon.pdf.

[13] Calvino, I. The Daughters of the Moon. The New Yorker, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/23/the-daughters-of-the-moon.

[14] Carr, N. Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Atlantic, 2008. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/.

[15] Carr, N. The Shallows. What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.

[16] Carr, N. The Glass Cage. Automation and Us. W. W. Norton & Company, London, 2014.

[17] Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. The extended mind. Analysis 58, 1 (1998), 7–19.

[18] Clark, A. Material Symbols. Philosophical Psychology 19, 3 (2006), 1–17.

[19] Collins, B. The Four-Moon Planet. Ballistics, 2010. http://30poems.blogspot.ro/2010/04/billy-collins.html.

[20] Deitch, G. The Moon Man. 1981. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4_urwioa48.

[21] Desantis, A.D. A Couple of White Guys Sitting Around Talking. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 32, 4 (2003), 432–466.

[22] Dragicevic, P., Chevalier, F., and Huot, S. Running an HCI experiment in multiple parallel universes. Proceedings of the extended abstracts of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA ’14, ACM Press (2014), 607–618.

[23] Edge.org. 2010: How is the Internet Changing the Way you Think? 2010. http://edge.org/contributors/how-is-the-internet-changing-the-way-you-think.

[24] Ennis, S. The Man who Sells the Moon. The New York Times, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/opinion/the-man-who-sells-the-moon.html.

[25] Esteban, J.G. Earth and Moon gravitational field. Flickr, 2010.

[26] Freebird Games. To The Moon. http://freebirdgames.com/to_the_moon/.

[27] Gangadharan, S. Phases of the Moon. Flickr, 2008.

[28] Humă, B. Enhancing the authenticity of assessments through grounding in first impressions. The British Journal of Social Psychology, (2014).

[29] Kettler, A. Earth & Moon in HD Gyro 3D. Google Play, 2014. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.afkettler.earth&hl=en.

[30] Krueger, J.W. Empathy and the extended mind. Zygon 44, 3 (2009), 675–698.

[31] Metzinger, T. Public Dreaming. Edge.org, 2010. http://edge.org/response-detail/11014.

[32] Moongiant. Moon Phase Today. 2014. http://www.moongiant.com/phase/today/.

[33] Munnerley, D., Bacon, M., Wilson, A., Steele, J., Hedberg, J., and Fitzgerald, R. Confronting an augmented reality. Research in Learning Technology 20, (2012).

[34] NASA. Evolution of the Moon. 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKmSQqp8wY.

[35] NASA. Tour of the Moon. 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iSZMv64wuU.

[36] NASA. The Moon in Songs. 2014. http://moon.nasa.gov/moonsongs.cfm.

[37] Nuotio, S. Google Poetics. http://www.googlepoetics.com/.

[38] Pariser, E. The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. The Penguin Press, London, 2011.

[39] Perkins, D.N. Person-plus: a distributed view of thinking and learning. In G. Salomon, ed., Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, 88–110.

[40] Pettengill, R. Moon Super 140811. Flickr, 2011.

[41] Pivi & Co. UglyBooth. Google Play, 2014. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.piviandco.uglybooth&hl=en.

[42] Popova, M. Five visualizations to grasp the scale of the universe. brainpickings.org, 2010. http://www.brainpickings.org/2010/10/11/the-scale-of-the-universe/.

[43] Popova, M. The Distance of the Moon: Beautiful Israeli Animated Film Based on the Italo Calvino Classic. brainpickings.org, 2012. http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/10/15/the-distance-of-the-moon-italo-calvino-film/.

[44] Roepstorff, A. Things to think with: words and objects as material symbols. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences 363, 1499 (2008), 2049–54.

[45] Rosental, C. Weaving self-evidence: a sociology of logic. Princeton University Press, 2008.

[46] Rothman, J. Live from the Moon. The New Yorker, 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/live-moon.

[47] Rughiniș, R. Talkative Objects in Need of Interpretation. Re-Thinking Digital Badges in Education. CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (2013), 2099–2108.

[48] Schwartz, J. Vocal minority insists it was all smoke and mirrors. The New York Times, (2009).

[49] Serfaty, S. The distance to the Moon - after Italo Calvino. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ9cEZhiGPw.

[50] Smart, P.R. The Web-Extended Mind. Metaphilosophy 43, 4 (2012), 446–463.

[51] Smolin, L. We have become hunter gatherers of images and information. Edge.org, 2010. https://edge.org/response-detail/11653.

[52] Solomonoff, G. Of knowledge, content, place and space. Edge.org, 2010. http://edge.org/response-detail/11667.

[53] Suchman, L.A. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge University Press, 1987.

[54] Tenenberg, J. and Knobelsdorf, M. Out of our minds: a review of sociocultural cognition theory. Computer Science Education 24, 1 (2014), 1–24.

[55] Turkle, S. Introduction: The things that matter. In Evocative objects: Things we think with. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007.

[56] Turkle, S., ed. Evocative Objects: Things to Think With. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007.

[57] Veritassium. How far away is the Moon? Youtube, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz9D6xba9Og.

[58] VoEC. Personal Trip to the Moon. Kongregate.com, 2012. http://www.kongregate.com/games/VoEC/personal-trip-to-the-moon.

[59] Wikipedia Contributors. Moon. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopaedia, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moon&oldid=640876112.

[60] Worth, J. If the Moon were only 1 pixel. http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html.