Prototyping Social Action
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
- Article 1 “How industrial design interacts with technology: A case study on the design of a stone crusher” (Kurvinen 2005)
- Article 2 “Emotions in Action: a Case in Mobile Visual Communication” (Kurvinen 2004)
- Article 3 “Only When Miss Universe Snatches Me: Teasing in MMS Messaging” (Kurvinen 2003)
- Article 4 “Towards socially aware pervasive computing: a turn-taking approach” (Kurvinen and Oulasvirta 2004)
- Article 5 “Are You Alive? Sensor Data as Resource for Social Interaction” (Kurvinen, Lähteenmäki, Salovaara and Lopez 2007, forthcoming)
- Article 6 “Prototyping Social Interaction” (Kurvinen, Koskinen and Battarbee 2007, forthcoming)
The data discussed in the articles comes from six different studies or projects,listed chronologically below.
- 1999-2001: Mobile Image study (Articles 2 and 6)
- 2001-2002: Between project (Article 4)
- 2002: Wireless Imaging study (a part of Article 6)
- 2002: Radiolinja MMS Pilot study (Articles 3 and 6)
- 2002-2004: Proomu project (Article 1)
- 2004-2006: IST MobiLife project (Article 5)
User-Centered Design and Social Action
UCD and usability
User-centered design, also called human-centered design (ISO 1999), is a research and product development orientation that utilizes end-user or customer information for making better (efficient, usable, enjoyable, etc.) and thus commercially successful products. In practice, this is achieved by involving the end user in the product development process.
Gould and Lewis list the key principles of UCD, dating back to the 1970s:
