Centre for Human Interactivity

CHI is a research centre at the Institute of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark. CHI performs foundational and applied research into human interactivity, primarily in organisational settings, based on an approach of ecological naturalism.

• Human interactivity is a mode of social and ecological cognition (i.e. flexible, adaptive behaviour) that unfolds as epistemic and pragmatic actions and co-actions on multiple time-scales. It thus designates a species-specific, sense-saturated form of co-ordination. Interactivity is an ontological substrate that can be interpreted as interaction, cognition, organisation, or ecological niche production, depending on the perspective of the interpreter. Definition: “human interactivity is sense-saturated coordination that contributes to human action” (Cowley and Steffensen, forth.).

• Organisational settings are understood as eco-social environments which constrain interactivity by defining situation-transcending roles and objectives that are linked with the organisation’s raison d’être (e.g. producing material products, caring for patients, educating children and adolescents, performing research activities, or achieving societal changes). 
• Ecological naturalism: We refer to our philosophy of science as ecological naturalism. Ecological naturalism implies ontological naturalisation without methodological naturalisation: we approach our object field as profoundly material/natural/ecological, but we discard materialist reductionism. Ecological naturalism is both irreducible to the bio-reductionism known from the life sciences, and the socio-reductionism (e.g. constructionism) known from the social sciences and the humanities.