dourish ch3 - social computing

Whereas his chapter on tangible computing looked at the intersections of the individual and computer design, this chapter focuses on how sociology informs the computer design (broadly defined to include physical and interface design). As such, it is heavily "Intro to Ethnogrphy".

[NOTE: While this may be new and significant in HCI, it's foundational for me, as I hold that the major precepts of our lives are socially-constructed and thrust into our individual lifespace. Thus, much of our individual "meaning-making" energy is spent embodying them. One might say that an answer to the question, "What is the meaning of life?" is accepting or embracing societal's expectations. I believe there are other, more challenging (and "better"), answers though.]

It gets interesting again for me when he starts to apply the use of ethnographic methods to technology, for example, in drawing attention to the distinction between work process and work practice (p. 62) through the examples of fligh controllers and a print shop. In analysis, he brings up Lucy Suchman's (1987) Plans and Situated Actions, where Suchman suggests that Sociology had rendered the "planning" paradigm innacurate. We do not create a plan and follow it. At best, the "plan" we create is merely one of several guides. Other, often more influential, guides are co-constructed in the shifting and unstable situations we encounter. (It is this co-construction with others, where the social computing will happen, but this comes later). Dourish introduces Ethnomethodology as a study that "turns its attention to the detailed analysis of actual practice, often drawing on ethnographic materials, and attempted to find, within them, evidence for the ways in which people achieved orderly social conduct" (p. 75). In other words, it asks why people on their own reconstruct the social order they are situated in.