Social Interaction Research is constituted by a cross-disciplinary merging of social design and interaction research. The program pursues three interconnected directions in its action-oriented research:
- understanding and documenting social practices in their natural (i.e., non-experimental) settings
- supporting processes of designing for social change that address a number of both well-identified and emergent societal challenges such as patient-centered healthcare, integration and language learning and rehabilitative correctional services;
- supporting the need for developing inventive methodologies focusing on qualitative methods that open highly sensitive or difficult contextual settings and organizations for ethnographic research. A central focus under this direction will be the development of state-of-the-art video-based ethnography as a research focus of its own.
In its practice, the program will organize research activities defined by its members as e.g. data sessions, Shared Inquiry Sessions, thematic groups, courses, presentations and public talks, and conferences.
The research in this program has in common that (a) we analyze video- and audio-recordings of human interaction; (b) we use video ethnography in design processes with the goal that the resulting artifacts, services or technologies are practically relevant and can be applied, e.g. to design/innovation/change/improvement; and (c) we use constructive design research where participants get involved in research processes through, for instance, co-design workshops, cultural probes, video sketching and tangible interview techniques.
The research SIR program is carried out in a tight, but dynamic coupling with education and lab-facilities thereby aiming at exploring new areas for application, collaboration and societal impact.
VideoLAB
As video plays an essential role in the program’s research activities the VideoLAB at MDLE provides technological support for field research, design work and processes of evaluating social design outcomes.
Social design
Social design is an established field that offers practice-based research tools and methods for how people can be involved in participatory design processes leading to social value for the individual and society at large. By social value, we refer to changes at a human scale that are felt to be beneficial for marginalized or vulnerable civic groups, families and communities. Insofar as it aims at bringing about social value by empowering underserved people, social design is related to social innovation and social entrepreneurship, but there are a number of differences. For instance, that design – the process of making artifacts, services or systems – is taken to be the central means by which change is achieved.
Interaction Research
Social interaction research aims at understanding the social practices through which members of society organize their social lives, including social lives with and around novel technologies, as orderly courses of action. This is done through naturalistic and/or ethnographic studies typically through video recordings of everyday activities.