The Social Construction of Displays

We employ ethnography to consider the nature of existing non-electronic ‘displays’ in the home. The word display is placed in scare quotes to draw attention to the act of displaying. Seen from the point of view of action it is evident that displays are socially constructed by people in their routine interactions with the material technologies available in the settings where their actions are situated. Through the use of a setting’s material technologies to construct mutually intelligible displays for one another people come to coordinate their actions. Our ethnographic studies show that these ‘coordinate displays’ are distributed across a variety of locations within a setting. Taken together these displays articulate an ecologically distributed network elaborating the unique needs of particular environments and requirements for the development of computer support for cooperative work. We elaborate this point of view through an ethnographic study of the coordinate displays implicated in mail use in the home environment.

[1]  H. Blumer,et al.  Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method , 1988 .

[2]  Lucy A. Suchman,et al.  Office procedure as practical action: models of work and system design , 1983, TOIS.

[3]  Harvey Sacks.  Structures of Social Action: Notes on methodology , 1985 .

[4]  A. Venkatesh.  A Conceptualization of the Household/Technology Interaction , 1985 .

[5]  J. M. Atkinson.  Structures of Social Action: Contents , 1985 .

[6]  Wendy E. Mackay,et al.  More than just a communication system: diversity in the use of electronic mail , 1988, CSCW '88.

[7]  Wendy E. Mackay,et al.  Diversity in the use of electronic mail: a preliminary inquiry , 1988, TOIS.

[8]  G. Button.  Ethnomethodology and the human sciences: Contributors , 1991 .

[9]  Kjeld Schmidt,et al.  Taking CSCW Seriously: Supporting Articulation Work * , 1992 .

[10]  Morten Kyng,et al.  Design at Work , 1992 .

[11]  Lucy Suchman,et al.  Understanding practice: video as a medium for reflection and design (excerpt) , 1992 .

[12]  M. Lynch,et al.  Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action , 1993 .

[13]  Dan Shapiro,et al.  The limits of ethnography: combining social sciences for CSCW , 1994, CSCW '94.

[14]  Lucy A. Suchman,et al.  Making work visible , 1995, CACM.

[15]  Alladi Venkatesh,et al.  Computers and other interactive technologies for the home , 1996, CACM.

[16]  Jesper Simonsen,et al.  Using ethnography in contextural design , 1997, CACM.

[17]  Tom Rodden,et al.  At home with the technology: an ethnographic study of a set-top-box trial , 1999, TCHI.

[18]  Debby Hindus,et al.  The Importance of Homes in Technology Research , 1999, CoBuild.

[19]  Jacek Gwizdka,et al.  Timely reminders: a case study of temporal guidance in PIM and email tools usage , 2000, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[20]  Victoria Bellotti,et al.  E-mail as habitat: an exploration of embedded personal information management , 2001, INTR.

[21]  Anoop Gupta,et al.  Supporting Email Workflow , 2001 .

[22]  Richard Harper,et al.  Paper mail in the home of the 21st century: An analysis of the future of paper mail and implications for the design of electronic alternatives , 2002 .

[23]  Alain Karsenty,et al.  Unremarkable computing , 2002, CHI.

[24]  Andy Crabtree,et al.  Designing collaborative systems - a practical guide to ethnography , 2003, The Kluwer international series on computer supported cooperative work.

[25]  Kjeld Schmidt,et al.  Taking CSCW seriously , 1992, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).