Prototyping Social Interaction

Introduction Recent changes in information technology have made social interaction an increasingly important topic for interaction design and technology development. Mobile phones, PDAs, games, and laptops have eased interpersonal communication and brought it into new contexts such as bus stops, trains, cars, and city streets—in fact everywhere people find themselves and move about. In these 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 for guiding the design of such systems. For interaction design, these technologies represent new kinds of challenges. Interaction design has inherited its methodic baggage mainly from three sources, none of which specifically focuses on how ordinary people use social technologies. Usability research and human-computer interaction (HCI) seldom quote sociological theory in their premises.1 While research in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) increasingly has focused on questions outside of the workplace, the basis of this field of study still stems from studies of the workplace, in which social organization is devised to support work rather than ordinary activities.2 New articulations of methods and frameworks are required for designing interactive technologies for social interaction in ordinary activities. This paper describes a series of studies conducted in Helsinki that focused on prototyping how people interact with each other using mobile multimedia. The central claim is that a prototype is not only a representation of a product or technology—such as a paper prototype, a software prototype, or a physical mock-up—but that it consists of both the representation and the social interaction the participants create together. For convenience, we talk about “prototyping social interaction.” The argument of this paper applies in particular to small communication devices meant for everyday life, but it also can be used with other products and services. Social processes inevitably affect the way in which technology is perceived, accepted, and used. If these processes are neglected, designs face risks. In our opinion, there ought to be ways to anticipate at least some of them. 1 Jenny Preece, Human-Computer Interaction (Harlow, England: AddisonWesley, 1994). 2 See Andy Crabtree, Designing Collaborative Systems: A Practical Guide to Ethnography (London: Springer, 2003). Acknowledgement We would like to thank the Ministry of Trade and Industry for funding Mobile Image, Radiolinja for continuous cooperation and support, and Nokia Mobile Phones for funding Mobile Album.