Social theory as a thinking tool for empathic design

Design Issues

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 30-49

  Postma, Carolien ^a   Lauche, Kristina ^b   Stappers, Pieter Jan ^a  

^a DELFT UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY   (Netherlands)

^b RADBOUD UNIVERSITY NIJMEGEN   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84555188684     PISSN: 07479360     EISSN: 15314790     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/DESI_a_00122     Document Type: Article

References (121)

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11. Fulton Suri, "Empathic Design: Informed and Inspired by Other People's Experience," 51.
12. Koskinen and Battarbee, "Introduction to User Experience and Empathic Design," 37.
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20. Marc Steen, The Fragility of Human-Centered Design, Doctoral Thesis (Delft: Delft University of Technology, 2008).
21. Esko Kurvinen, Prototyping Social Action, Doctoral Thesis (Helsinki: University of Art and Design Helsinki, 2007).
22. Carolien E. Postma and others, "Doing Empathic Design: Experiences from Industry" (under review, 2011).
23. Jane Fulton Suri, "The Experience Evolution: Developments in Design Practice," The Design Journal 6:2 (2003): 39-48.
24. Peter Wright and John McCarthy, "Empathy and Experience in HCI," in Proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM Press, 2008): 637-646.
25. Froukje Sleeswijk Visser, Remko Van der Lugt and Pieter Jan Stappers, "Sharing User Experiences in the Product Innovation Process: Participatory Design Needs Participatory Communication," Creativity and Innovation Management 16:1 (2007): 35-45.
26. Postma, Lauche Stappers, "Trialogues: A Framework for Bbridging the Gap Between People Research and Design," 25-34.
27. Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt, Contextual Design: Defining Customercentered Systems. (San Francisco): Morgan Kaufmann, 1998).
28. Veesa Jääskö and Tuuli Mattelm̈ki, "Observing and Probing," in Proceedings of Designing Pleasurable Products Footnote 19 continued and Interfaces (2003), 126-131.
29. Froukje Sleeswijk Visser, Bringing the everyday life of people into design, Doctoral Thesis (Delft: Delft University of Technology, 2009).
30. Benjamin B. Bederson and Ben Shneiderman, The Craft of Information Visualization: Readings and Reflections (San Francisco): Morgan Kaufmann, 2003).
31. Ben Shneiderman, "Foreword," in Humancomputer Interaction and Management Information Systems: Foundations. Advances in Management Innovation Systems, Volume 5, ed. Ping Zhang, Ben Shneiderman and Dennis F. Galletta (Armonk): M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 2006), 6.
32. Postma, Lauche and Stappers, "Trialogues: A Framework for Bridging the Gap Between People Research and Design," 25-34.
33. Sleeswijk Visser, Bringing the Everyday Life of People Into Design.
34. Michael A. Hogg and Graham M. Vaughan, Social Psychology, fourth edition (London: Pearson Prentice Hall: 2005).
35. Michael A. Hogg and Graham M. Vaughan, Social Psychology, fourth edition (London: Pearson Prentice Hall: 2005).
36. Hall (1966) introduced the term 'proxemics" to refer to the study of how people unconsciously structure their immediate surroundings. One type of spatial organization is 'informal space,' or 'interpersonal distance.' Interpersonal distance is one way people use to establish and maintain a desired level of involvement in social interaction, e.g., in greeting, caressing or conversing. Hall distinguished four distance zones, ranging from very close to the individual to further away: An intimate zone, a personal zone, a social zone, and a public zone. Which zone people adopt depends on the context of the social encounter; the setting, social relationship and environmental conditions. In some situations, people are not able to adopt their preferred social distance, for example, in an elevator or crowded train, which may lead to discomfort.
37. John R. Aiello, "Human Spatial Behavior," in Handbook of Environmental Psychology, ed. Daniel Stokols and Irwin Altman (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1987), 359.
38. Robert B. Bechtel, Environment and behavior: An introduction (Thousand Oaks): Pearson Prentice Hall, 1997).
39. Tajfel and Turner (1979) introduced Social Identity Theory, a theory of social change that has been very influential in social psychology. The theory focuses on how social context affects self-concept and social behavior. People describe themselves differently and sometimes also behave differently in different social contexts, for example, in front of colleagues at work, or with family at home. Social identity theorists distinguish two different classes of identity: personal identity and social identity. Personal identity is the individual's selfconcept derived from his/her attitudes, memories, behaviors and emotions. Social identity is the individual's self-concept derived from perceived membership of social groups. People have as many personal identities as they have interpersonal relationships that they feel engaged in. And they have as many social identities as groups they feel they belong to. The personal or social identity that is most salient at a given time shapes our concept of self and corresponding behavior. See Hogg and Vaughan, Social Psychology, fourth edition.
40. Benyon, Turner and Turner, "Designing Interactive Systems: People, Activities, Contexts, Technologies."
41. Carolien E. Postma and Pieter Jan Stappers (2006), "A Vision on Social Interactions as the Basis for Design," CoDesign, 2:3, 139-155.
42. Situated action studies the relation between acting individuals and their changing environment. The term 'situated action' was first introduced by Lucy Suchman in her book 'Plans and Situated Actions' (1987) to stress the emergent, improvisatory character of people's activities. The book is a critical response to the information-processing paradigm, which models people as cognitive systems that pursue action after having set goals and having developed plans. Suchman, taking an ethnomethodological stance, argued that the structure of activity is not planned, but evolves in response to real-world situations that are inherently dynamic. Suchman does recognize the existence of plans, but merely as one of several resources within the situation that may shape an activity.
43. Goals, she argues, are defined in retrospect. Suchman uses the example of canoeing in explaining the idea of Situated Action: 'In planning a series of rapids in a canoe, one is very likely to sit above the falls and plan one's descent. (...) But, however detailed, the plan stops short of the actual business of getting your canoe through the falls. When it really comes down to the details of responding to currents and handling a canoe, you effectively abandon the plan and fall back on whatever embodied skills are available to you.'
44. Lucy A. Suchman, Plans and situated actions: The problem of human machine communication (New York): Cambridge University Press, 1987).
45. Bonnie Nardi, "Studying Context: A Comparison of Activity Theory, Situated Action Models and Distributed Cognition," Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and human-computer interaction, ed. Bonnie A. Nardi (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 69.
46. Behavior Settings theory focuses on the relationship between extra-individual behavior and environmental units. From detailed field observations Barker (1968) found that human behavior is not randomly distributed across time and space; 'the inhabitants of identical ecological units exhibit a characteristic overall extra-individual pattern of behavior,' he argued (Barker, 1968). In a school class, for example, teacher and students behave 'school class.' In the supermarket people, including the teacher of the school class, behave 'supermarket.' And during a meeting of the teachers of the school, the teachers behave 'staff meeting.' Barker called the physical-behavioral units 'behavior settings.' Behavior settings are 'stable, extra-individual units with great coercive power over the behavior that occurs within them.'
47. Roger G. Barker, Ecological Psychology: Concepts and methods for studying the environment of human behavior (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968).
48. Gibson proposed an ecological approach to perception. In his book 'The Ecological Approach to Perception' (1979), he described a new paradigm for understanding human activity in context, focusing not on the actor and (part of) his/her environment as independent things, but rather on the relations between actor and environment. He introduced the term 'affordances' to mean the full set of potential actions that an environment holds in store for a particular actor. For example, a ladder affords an adult to climb up and down, but it does not afford a baby to climb up and down. Information about affordances is available to the actor's senses. The actor's attunement to particular affordances is determined by his/her needs and intentions, personal history and context.
49. James J. Gibson, The ecological approach to visual perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).
50. Gerda Smets, Vormleer: De paradox van de vorm (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 1986).
51. Several people have elaborated on Gibson's concept of affordances for understanding the social. Gaver, for example, introduced the term 'Affordances for Sociality' to refer to the possibilities offered by the physical environment for social activity. An example of affordance of sociality is the table setting presented in figure 1.
52. Gaver, "Affordances for Interaction: The Social is Material for Design," 111-129.
53. Valenti and Good used Gibson's ecological approach to perception as a framework for studying social interaction. They introduced the term 'Social Affordances,' meaning the possibilities for action that people offer one another, and the role of other people in pointing out new affordances. People may, for example, afford one another comforting, fighting, or play.
54. Stavros S. Valenti and James M. M. Good, "Social Affordances and Interaction I: Introduction," Ecological Psychology 3:2 (1991): 77-98.
55. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
56. Katja Battarbee and Ilpo Koskinen, "Co-experience: User experience as interaction," CoDesign 1:1 (2005): 5-18.
57. Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
58. Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
59. John Hughes and others, "Patterns of Home Life: Informing Design for Domestic Environments," Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 4:1 (2000): 25-38.
60. Andy Crabtree, Terry Hemmings and Tom Rodden, "Pattern-based Support for Interactive Design in Domestic Settings," in Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (New York: ACM Press, 2002): 265-276.
61. David Martin and others, "Finding patterns in the fieldwork," in Proceedings of the 7th Conference on European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Norwell: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 39-58.
62. David Martin and others, "Patterns of Interaction: A Pattern Language for CSCW," www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/research/projects (accessed August 4, 2010).
63. Harold H. Kelley and others, An atlas of interpersonal situations (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
64. Thomas J. L. Van Rompay, Expressions: Embodiment in the Experience of Design, Doctoral Thesis (Delft: Delft University of Technology, 2005).
65. Donald A., Schön, D. A., Displacement of Concepts (London): Tavistock Publications, 1963).
66. Hernan P. Casakin, "Assessing the Use of Metaphors in the Design Process," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 33:2 (2006): 253-268.
67. Taylor Harper, "The Gift of the Gab?: A Design-oriented Sociology of Young People's Use of Mobiles," 267.
68. Daniel Rigney, The Metaphorical Society: An Invitation to Social Theory (Landham): Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001).
69. Joel M. Charon, Symbolic Interactionism: An introduction, an interpretation, an integration, eight edition (Englewood Cliffs): Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004).
70. Erving Goffman is considered to be an important contributor to Social Interactionism, a major sociological perspective that focuses on the process of meaning making in social interaction. In 'The presentation of Self in everyday life,' Goffman uses the metaphor of theoretical performance as a framework in explaining and analyzing the structure of social encounters between people. He views the world as a stage, people as actors and social interaction as drama. 'The world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify,' Goffman (1959) maintains.
71. Key factor in this structure, Goffman argues, is the process of developing and maintaining a shared understanding of a situation, including Self (i.e., impression management).'Each person in everyday social intercourse presents himself and his activity to others, attempts to guide and control the impressions they form of him, and employs certain techniques in order to sustain his performance, just as an actor presents a character to an audience,' he explains.
72. Erving Goffman, The presentation of Self in everyday life (New York): Anchor Books Doubleday, 1959).
73. Joel M. Charon, Symbolic Interactionism: An introduction, an interpretation, an integration, eight edition (Englewood Cliffs): Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004.
74. Performance - In their performance, the performers consciously or unconsciously project their roles and their definition of the situation to the audience. The audience observes the performance and makes inferences about the performers (e.g., their motives, emotions, beliefs, attitudes) and the performers' definition of the situation. The roles of performer and audience may switch continuously.
75. Location - Front stage is where the performance takes place and both performers and audience are present. Back stage is where the performers are present, but the audience is not. Here the performers can relax and behave out of character. The waiter of a restaurant (i.e., performer), for example, may be very polite and charming in front of the customer who complains about the food (i.e., audience). But once back in the kitchen (i.e., back stage), the waiter and his colleague may imitate the customer and make fun of him. Note that the back stage in one performance could be the front stage in another performance. In the example, the waiter and his colleague in the kitchen also perform in front of each other.
76. Script - Prescribes the performance: What happens to whom, when, where, how and why? How is tension built up? When does the scenery change?
77. Tools of expression - Vehicles for conveying signs that the performers, either or not consciously, use in their performance. There are three types of tools: appearance tools, e.g., clothing, posture, age; behavior tools, e.g., facial expressions, attitude and gestures; and setting tools, e.g., stage props, physical lay-out and scenery.
78. Social role - Each performer has a particular social role, e.g., the role of 'father,' 'manager,' or 'teacher.' Social roles involve one or more parts, or 'routines.' A part is a pre-established pattern of action that is unfolded during a performance. The performer may play the same part on different occasions.
79. Kari Kuutti, "Activity Theory as a potential framework for human-computer interaction research," in Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and human-computer interaction, Bonnie A. Nardi (Cambridge): MIT Press, 1996), 17.
80. Benyon, Turner and Turner, "Designing Interactive Systems: People, Activities, Contexts, Technologies."
81. Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962).
82. Aleksie N. Leont'ev, Activity, Consciousness, and Personality (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1978).
83. Yrjö Engeström, Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research, (Helsinki: Orienta-Konsulit, 1987).
84. Yrjö Engeström, "Expansive Learning at Work: Toward an Activity Theoretical Reconceptualization," Journal of Education and Work 14:1 (2001): 133-156.
85. Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi, Acting with Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
86. Kari Kuutti, "Artifacts, activities, and design knowledge," in Design Integrations: Research and Collaboration, ed. Sharon Poggenpohl and Keiichi Sato (Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2009), 67.
87. Kaptelinin Nardi, Acting with Technology.
88. Victor Kaptelinin, Bonnie Nardi and Catriona Macaulay, "The Activity Checklist: A Tool for Representing the 'Space' of Context," Interactions 6:4 (1999): 27-39.
89. Engeström, "Expansive Learning at Work: Toward an Activity Theoretical Reconceptualization," 133.
90. Victor Kaptelinin, "The Object of Activity: Making Sense of the Sense-Maker," Mind, Culture and Activity 12:1 (2005): 4-8.
91. Yrjö Engeström and Frank Blackler, "On the Life of the Object," Organization 12:3 (2005): 307-330.
92. Mattelm̈ki, Design Probes, Doctoral Thesis.
93. Sanders, "Generative tools for codesigning," 3-12.
94. Buchenau Fulton Suri, "Experience Prototyping," 424-433.
95. Vygotsky, Thought and Language.
96. Kaptelinin Nardi, Acting with Technology 2006.
97. Kaptelinin Nardi, "The Activity Checklist: A tool for representing the 'space' of context," 27-39.
98. Kuutti, "Activity Theory as a potential framework for human-computer interaction research," 17.
99. Engeström, "Expansive Learning at Work: Toward an Activity Theoretical Reconceptualization," 133-156.
100. Nardi, "Studying Context: A Comparison of Activity Theory, Situated Action Models and Distributed Cognition," 69-102.
101. Susanne Bødker, "Applying Activity Theory to Video Analysis: How to Make Sense of Video Data in Human-computer Interaction," in Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-computer Interaction, ed. Bonnie A. Nardie (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 147.
102. Kuutti, "Activity Theory as a Potential Framework for Human-computer Interaction Research," 17.
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111. Bødker, "Applying Activity Theory to Video Analysis: How to Make Sense of Video Data in Human-computer Interaction," 147-174.
112. Collins, Shukla Redmiles, "Activity Theory and System Design: A View From the Trenches," 55-80.
113. Phil Turner, Susan Turner and Julie Horton, "From Description to Requirements: An Activity Theoretic Perspective," Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work (New York: ACM Press, 1999), 286-295.
114. Nardi, "Activity Theory and Humancomputer Interaction Research," 7.
115. Benyon, Turner and Turner, "Designing Interactive Systems: People, Activities, Contexts, Technologies."
116. Postma, Lauche and Stappers, "Trialogues: A Framework for Bridging the Gap Between People Research and Design," 25.
117. Nandini P. Nayak, Debbie Mrazek and David R. Smith, "Analyzing and Communicating Usability Data: Now That You Have the Data What Do You Do?," ACM SIGCHI Bulletin 27:1 (1994): 22-30.
118. Karen Holtzblatt, Jessamyn Burns Wendell and Shelley Wood, Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques to Usercentered Design (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2005).
119. Yrjö Engeström, Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research.
120. Victor Kaptelinin, "Computer-mediated Activity: Functional Organs in Social and Developmental Contexts," Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-computer Interaction, ed. Bonnie A. Nardi (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 45.
121. Kaptelinin and Nardi, Acting with Technology.