An ethnography of a neighbourhood café: informality, table arrangements and background noise

Café society is something that many of us as customers and/or social theorists take for granted. Cafés are places where we are not simply served hot beverages but are also in some way partaking of a specific form of public life. It is this latter aspect that has attracted the attention of social theorists, especially Jürgen Habermas, and leads them to locate the café as a key place in the development of modernity. Our approach to cafés is to ‘turn the tables’ on theories of the public sphere and return to just what the life of a particular café consists of, and in so doing re-specify a selection of topics related to public spaces. The particular topics we deal with in a ‘worldly manner’ are the socio-material organisation of space, informality and rule following. In as much as we are able we have drawn on an ethnomethodological way of doing and analysing our ethnographic studies

Workplace Surfaces as Resource for Social Interactions

Space and spatial arrangements play an important role in our everyday social interactions. The way we use and manage our surrounding space is not coincidental, on the contrary, it reflects the way we think, plan and act. Within collaborative contexts, its ability to support social activities makes space an important component of human cognition in the post-cognitive era. As technology designers, we can learn a lot by rigorously understanding the role of space for the purpose of designing collaborative systems. In this paper, we describe an ethnographic study on the use of workplace surfaces in design studios. We introduce the idea of artful surfaces. Artful surfaces are full of informative, inspirational and creative artefacts that help designers accomplish their everyday design practices. The way these surfaces are created and used could provide information about how designers work. Using examples from our fieldwork, we show that artful surfaces have both functional and inspirational characteristics. We indentify four types of artful surfaces: personal, shared, project-specific and live surfaces. We believe that a greater insight into how these artful surfaces are created and used could lead to better design of novel display technologies to support designers' everyday work

Supporting ethnographic studies of ubiquitous computing in the wild

Ethnography has become a staple feature of IT research over the last twenty years, shaping our understanding of the social character of computing systems and informing their design in a wide variety of settings. The emergence of ubiquitous computing raises new challenges for ethnography however, distributing interaction across a burgeoning array of small, mobile devices and online environments which exploit invisible sensing systems. Understanding interaction requires ethnographers to reconcile interactions that are, for example, distributed across devices on the street with online interactions in order to assemble coherent understandings of the social character and purchase of ubiquitous computing systems. We draw upon four recent studies to show how ethnographers are replaying system recordings of interaction alongside existing resources such as video recordings to do this and identify key challenges that need to be met to support ethnographic study of ubiquitous computing in the wild

Making OR practice visible: Using ethnomethodology to analyse facilitated modelling workshops

Empirical studies attempting to open the ‘black box’ of the practice of operational research (OR) are beginning to appear in the literature, particularly within the area known as behavioural OR. Many scholars within this community share a commitment to both empirically investigate what OR practitioners and users actually do when engaged in OR-supported processes, and evaluate what the effect of these ‘doings’ is. Despite these developments, we still know very little about the complexities and situated specifics of OR practice as it happens on the ground. This is mostly due to the methodological challenges involved in treating real-time OR practice as an analytical problem, which requires making OR practice ‘visible’ by bringing to the fore its material and interactional features for close examination. In this paper we adopt ethnomethodology as one way to address this challenge. Using an empirical vignette drawn from a facilitated modelling workshop in which causal mapping was used with a top management team, we illustrate how an ethnomethodologically-informed perspective can reveal the ways in which OR-supported activity is practically accomplished by those involved, moment by moment, and with what effects. We conclude the paper by summarising the contribution that these kinds of fine-grained studies of OR practice make to the behavioural OR agenda, and outline some potentially useful avenues for future research

Early Social Interaction: A Case Comparison of Developmental Pragmatics and Psychoanalytic Theory

This book brings together various threads of the research work I have been involved with over a number of years. This research is based on a longitudinal video recorded study of one ofmydaughters as shewas learning howto talk. The impetus for engaging in this work arose from a sense that within developmental psychology and child language, when people are interested in understanding howchildren use language, they seem over-focused or concerned with questions of formal grammar and semantics. My interest is on understanding how a child learns to talk and through this process is then understood as being or becoming a member of a culture. When a young child is learning how to engage in everyday interaction she has to acquire those competencies that allow her to be simultaneously oriented to the conventions that inform talk-ininteraction and at the same time deal with the emotional or affective dimensions of her experience. It turns out that in developmental psychology these domains are traditionally studied separately or at least by researchers whose interests rarely overlap. In order to understand better early social relations (parent–child interaction), I want to pursue the idea that we will benefit by studying both early pragmatic development and emotional development. Not surprisingly, the theoretical positions underlying the study of these domains provide very different accounts of human development and this book illuminates why this might be the case. What follows will I hope serve as a case-study on the interdependence between the analysis of social interaction and subsequent interpretation

Wild camping and the weight of tourism

Wild camping forms a specific social reality within which tourists often claim not to be tourists and within which the capitalist practices central to tourism are messy. Yet, wild camping exemplifies the core idea in tourism: engaging in time during which time is ‘free’. Here the concern is with the ways in which we ‘do’ going camping. We take material interaction with space, place and things as a starting point, via ethnomethodologically informed ethnography, in focusing upon the deployment of mundane, taken-for-granted assumptions, knowledge and practices. We find urban nomads engaged in the clearing, freedom and escape of the outdoors (the lightness), but anchored by the materialities of doing everyday life work, weighted with responsibilities towards nature, things and people

Methodological issues in developing a multi-dimensional coding procedure for small group chat communication

In CSCL research, collaboration through chat has primarily been studied in dyadic settings. This article discusses three issues that emerged during the development of a multi-dimensional coding procedure for small group chat communication: a) the unit of analysis and unit fragmentation, b) the reconstruction of the response structure and c) determining reliability without overestimation. Threading, i.e. connections between analysis units, proved essential to handle unit fragmentation, to reconstruct the response structure and for reliability of coding. In addition, a risk for reliability overestimation was illustrated. Implications for analysis methodology in CSCL are discussed

Experiential Role of Artefacts in Cooperative Design

The role of material artefacts in supporting distributed and co-located work practices has been well acknowledged within the HCI and CSCW research. In this paper, we show that in addition to their ecological, coordinative and organizational support, artefacts also play an ‘experiential’ role. In this case, artefacts not only improve efficiency or have a purely functional role (e.g. allowing people to complete tasks quickly), but the presence and manifestations of these artefacts bring quality and richness to people’s performance and help in making better sense of their everyday lives. In a domain like industrial design, such artefacts play an important role for supporting creativity and innovation. Based on our prolonged ethnographic fieldwork on understanding cooperative design practices of industrial design students and researchers, we describe several experiential practices that are supported by mundane artefacts like sketches, drawings, physical models and explorative prototypes – used and developed in designers’ everyday work. Our main intention to carry out this kind of research is to develop technologies to support designers’ everyday practices. We believe that with the emergence of ubiquitous computing, there is a growing need to focus on personal, emotional and social side of people’s everyday experiences. By focusing on the experiential practices of designers, we can provide a holistic view in the design of new interactive technologies