The fine art of conversation

This workshop is aimed at giving human interaction researchers the conceptual and practical apparatus to balance their representations of data (mixes of drawings and photographs in the most part), so as to “maximally incite, but also constrain” their representations, just as artists sometimes succeed in doing (Streeck, Grothues, & Villanueva, 2009, p.28). Why-as Streeck points out-are the drawings and visualisations of interaction researchers so halting and timid, compared to the ways artists have responded to the same kinds of representational problems? Are these heavily segmented and sparsely constructed representations of interaction the result of a prevailing positivistic outlook with regard to representing shared space, where interaction is presented as staggered and discrete physical events with apparently little to connect them. The workshop seeks to redress this situation by examining the solutions that artists have arrived at when representing human interaction, and asking participants to engage in a series of activities and discussions which will re-frame their approaches to this issue.