We explore the use of mediated visual touch in distant social interaction. Adopting an interactionist and collaborative approach to human communication, we focus on the communicative functions of distant touch behaviours which interactants co-elaborate throughout their mediated interactions. Our results highlight: (1) a variety of visual-touch functions with a redistribution of functions mostly supported by other modalities of communication in face-to-face interactions, such as illustrating aspects of the ongoing conversation; (2) the visual-touch characteristics as well as the verbal, paraverbal and non-verbal indicators of the interactional context considered by the participants to make sense of the stimuli and; (3) the multifactorial and dynamic aspects of the co-elaboration process of the visual-touch functions, reaffirming the role of interactional context, combined with cultural and biographical knowledge, in the meaning making.

We present analyses of how disagreements are managed across socio-technical and dialogical spaces in French Wikipedia, with respect to two case studies, on Freud and the Turin Shroud. We show, on one hand, that moderators’ attempts to resolve disagreements by requiring participants to cite sources simply displace conflicts to the nature of those sources, their validity, their authors and the good faith of their proponents. Disagreements are managed rather than resolved dialectically by displacing them to alternative socio-technical spaces, such as different sections of the text itself, or participants’ personal pages.

This research delves into the world of conversation analysis, focusing on the unique conversational agent, Lenny. In contrast to most modern AI-based chatbots, Lenny employs a minimalistic approach, utilizing pre-recorded turns to engage with unsolicited callers and extend interactions. The study aims to dissect how Lenny’s long turns contribute to displaying ‘his’ personhood. By analyzing Lenny’s long turn in interaction, we uncover how it consolidates Lenny’s relatable character. Through analysis of a corpus of recorded interactions, the paper highlights the role of turn design in simulating human-like interactions. Ultimately, this research offers insights into the interplay between scripted content and human understanding in live conversations.

La pratique du design, et des disciplines de la conception en général, repose sur la production de représentations comme forme d’externalisation de la pensée (Visser, 2006), et sur l’enquête comme moyen empirique de compréhension des enjeux des parties prenantes d’un projet. Cet article s’inscrit à l’intersection de ces deux éléments, en posant la question de la pratique représentationnelle pour l’enquête : comment des designers-chercheurs débutants mobilisent-ils leurs compétences d’expression graphique pour développer des dispositifs d’enquête originaux afin de comprendre les comportements, les expériences et les opinions des enquêtés. L’article présente un retour d’expérience de 4 éditions d’un atelier de recherche en sciences sociales pour le design, dans le cadre d’une formation à la recherche. Chacun des dispositifs d’enquête construits pas les 25 groupes d’étudiants est caractérisé sur différentes variables relatives aux modes de collecte de donnée, aux types de données récoltées, à leur traitement et leur usage. Nous concluons sur les enjeux liés à l’articulation d’approches sensibles et analytiques dans les enquêtes de sciences sociales dans le champ de la recherche en Design.

As a contribution to research on transparency and failures in human–robot interaction (HRI), our study investigates whether the informational ecology configured by publicly displaying a robot’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) results is consequential in how miscommunications emerge and are dealt with. After a preliminary quantitative analysis of our participants’ gaze behavior during an experiment where they interacted with a conversational robot, we rely on a micro-analytic approach to detail how the interpretation of this robot’s conduct as inadequate was configured by what it displayed as having “heard” on its tablet. We investigate cases where an utterance or gesture by the robot was treated by participants as sequentially relevant only as long as they had not read the automatic speech recognition transcript but re-evaluated it as troublesome once they had read it. In doing so, we contribute to HRI by showing that systematically displaying an ASR transcript can play a crucial role in participants’ interpretation of a co-constructed action (such as shaking hands with a robot) as having “failed”. We demonstrate that “mistakes” and “errors” can be approached as practical accomplishments that emerge as such over the course of interaction rather than as social or technical phenomena pre-categorized by the researcher in reference to criteria exogenous to the activity being analyzed. In the end, while narrowing down on two video fragments, we find that this peculiar informational ecology did not merely impact how the robot was responded to. Instead, it modified the very definition of “mutual understanding” that was enacted and oriented to as relevant by the human participants in these fragments. Besides social robots, we caution that systematically providing such transcripts is a design decision not to be taken lightly; depending on the setting, it may have unintended consequences on interactions between humans and any form of conversational interface.

In this article, I focus on an interactional practice, personal noticings', in which a participant comments on something related to another's appearance, behavior, or environment. From the perspective of conversation analysis, I discuss the organization of these sequences and show how they put into play relational issues between participants. I then show that the affordances of video-mediated communication facilitate the production of personal noticings and analyze various examples of personal noticings made during video-mediated conversations between friends, as well as the relational work accomplished during these sequences. The case of personal noticings in video-mediated conversations illustrates how it is possible to precisely study the dynamics between interpersonal relationships and mediated forms of sociability at the level of the interactional practices themselves.

The rise of communication technologies and their intensive use in the workplace, in conjunction with the 2016 French labor law’s “right to disconnect”, has resulted in peaked interest in occupational risk prevention. This qualitative and quantitative study aims to define digital “overconnectivity”, the causes of discomfort experienced by employees while connected, and the connection regulation strategies within the enterprise. The aim is to take targeted preventive actions based on the results. The activity and lived experience of digital connection is studied through a questionnaire and through interviews, with a population of executives at the company Orange. Sources of discomfort associated with digital connectivity are identified and regulations in the company are analyzed.