Sissy - Elise van den Hoven

which are grounded in “the detailed and observable
practices, which make up the incarnate production of
ordinary social facts [0]”. Historically, the use of
ethnomethodology in Computer Supported Cooperative
Work arose from analysis of workplace settings. The
focus on the studies of people’s everyday interactions
in a variety of settings, not only work.
Recently, a growing body of critically informed HCI
approaches argue that analysis of everyday
technologies requires rethinking and readapting these
methodologies – or risking making all of our life like
work [0]. These culturally grounded approaches offer
researchers and designers cultural interpretations of
action and critiques of the design process.
The research presented here explores these two
methodological approaches by investigating the
potential to reconcile the two approaches in order to
better understand user needs and design implications
for systems that facilitate socio-physical interactions.
AUGMENTING THE ANALYSIS OF SOCIO-
PHYSICAL INTERACTIONS
The study investigated the use of the Kinect for Xbox
360 to enhance socio-physical interactions in
intergenerational families. Five intergenerational
families used the Kinect gaming system over a threeweek
period. The participants were instructed to film
their interaction during the game play session and two
follow up interviews with the participants were
conducted.
The researchers analyzed the video data to understand
how participants co-operate and collaborate in their
activities. This approach was informed by Jordan and
Henderson's account of ‘Interaction Analysis’ [0].
Cultural theory was also used to examine the video data
and interview transcripts to critically analyze not only
what the users in the study were doing, but also why
they were doing it in terms of what cultural forces
underpinned their behavior.
The next section will describe the defining features of
each approach. We will then examine the application of
these two approaches to understanding sociophysical
interactions.
Interaction Analysis
Interaction Analysis is consistent with
ethnomethodological approaches [0]. Interaction
analysis stresses the need to keep the analysis free from
analytical categories. It is through the course of
multiple replayings of the video data with a multidisciplinary
group that the emerging themes start to
appear.
The strength of Interaction Analysis is that it deals with
the actual details of technologically mediated
interactions and allows technology developers to see
exactly how existing technology fits (or doesn't fit) into
current practice. Interaction Analysis also exposes the
practical reasoning activities of participants themselves
35
in a way that avoids them having to remember, justify
or even know what they did. This effectively indicates
how people think and make sense of technology they
are using, moment by moment, in the performance of
some task.
The importance of situating the exploration of a human
activity in the context in which it will occur is
important. However, a strictly ethnomethodological
approach focuses on the exchanges of interaction in situ
and rejects theoretically informed lenses through which
to analyze the data [0]. Even though much of
ethnography in HCI is not strictly ethnomethodological,
the role of the researcher is more often one of a
fieldworker analyzing what is seen as naturally
occurring, rather than as a cultural facilitator and
interpreter.
While these ethnographic insights are valuable, the
approach is not without its limitations. Nardi [0] points
to the failure of observational and interview data to deal
with social structures, institutions and cultural values.
Sengers also notes the shortcomings in approaches that
fail to integrate cultural and historical analysis. A major
research challenge is the development of
methodologies that use cultural theory to analyze the
cultural context of everyday life and to develop
appropriate computer science technologies and
methodologies [0].
Cultural Theory
A growing body of critically informed HCI research
illustrates that cultural theory is relevant beyond
theoretical analysis and social commentary and has the
potential to extend beyond passive criticism of what it
is observing, to the active re-contextualization of
design and design approaches [0, 0].
Cultural theory helps us understand users' needs and
desires; it sheds light on why people are likely to adopt
one trend but not another and helps indicate which
cultural influences are shaping society at any given
time. It points out things like why our love for the iPod
extends beyond its functionality as an MP3 player and
includes our collective embrace of its distinctive white
headphone cords. So although design practice has ways
of understanding technological features—and of
eliciting user needs—cultural theory helps to illustrate
the symbolic value of technological artifacts, which is
often at least as important to their adoption and use as
their instrumental functions. This makes it a viable way
for a designer of technologies to reason and explore
new products or services [0].
Unlike ethnomethodology, which urges the researcher
to resist the role of cultural facilitator, the application
of cultural theory to HCI requires the researcher to
embrace the role. As Barzdell notes:
You, the critic, are constructing meaning. By
examining these relationships you’re not decoding
or finding what is empirically there (social sciences
are much better suited to this goal). Instead, you are