Prototyping Social Action

De Casiopea
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Introduction

The problem of social action

Recent changes in information technology have made social interaction an increasingly important topic for interaction design and technology development. Movilephones, PDAs, games and laptops have eased interpersonal communication and brought it into new contexts. In this situations, the old paradigms of one person interacting with technology, or a group at work in an office or collaborating over a shared system are inadequate in guiding the design of such systems. These technologies represent new challenges for interaction design, wich has inherited its methodological baggage mainly from three sources, non of which specifically focuses on how ordinary people use social technologies.

The main problem in studying social action for design is not the lack of methods, but the aproach: 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? In this study, ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA) provide a perspective for seeing structure in social action. As will be shown, without a proper and tested framework social action is a slippery topic. The main contribution of this study is that it articulates how this framework can be brought into design studies. This study also demonstrates empirically that this approach works.

The articles

User-Centered Design and Social Action

UCD and usability

Beyond usability, the new school