Investigating and Designing for Social Interaction

Abstract

Our design space consists partly of social practices on the road and partly of emerging mobile technology. Firstly, we are concerned with the role of social interaction on highways and streets. We are interested in understanding how and why road users act and react to each other. In this sense, the studies share their topic with sociology and especially so-called ethnographic research. The latter term refers to a collection of techniques to gather and organize field material to uncover not only how people interact, but also their motivations for doing so. It is often conducted with the guidance of three important principles: participant observation, inclusion of members’ viewpoints, and holism. Secondly, we utilize that knowledge to influence design of new type of mobile applications. We follow a course in which research and design are understood as a form of associative work, in which materials and people are combined and recombined as a local activity to generate innovative mobile services. Associative design emerges when participants in design establish a sustained collaboration involving dialogue and shared handling of material objects. Finally, both the interest in social practices and technology is combined in the selection of the specific case studies which in various ways contribute to our research topic