Information technology has made social interaction an increasingly important topic for interaction design and technology development. Today’s mobile technology provides for rich communication and awareness between people, regardless of their whereabouts. When people are gathered together, technology is also often present, influencing or even actively taking part in the social activity.
Social action is the essence of many systems studied, developed and prototyped by the design and research community. The problem is that this is often done without proper methodological backing. There is no lack of methods, but a need for an adequate approach: how should circumstances for social action to happen be created, how should it be observed, how should systematic, detailed inferences about it be produced for the purposes of design, and what design-related activities does such research serve?
Drawing from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this study addresses social action and social prototypes in various settings: at a workplace, in the area of mobile multimedia and the domain of ubiquitous context-aware systems. The main contribution of this study is that it articulates how this framework can be brought into design studies. The cases in this study also demonstrate empirically that this approach works
