(Salle F 101)

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Alby, Francesca (Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Roma)

Embodiment, Social Action and the Construction of Semiotic Artifacts

This presentation describes some of the results of a research project that studied the design practices of technological systems in an Internet company. The company manages a portal that provides services to a mass audience (personalized homepage, news, e-mail, sms, thematic channels, e-commerce, etc.). The company employs 40 people divided in two main work groups : producers and engineers. The former manage the editorial content while the latter manage the portal’s systems and applications. The research was conducted using an ethnographic method supported by tools of conversational analysis.

The research takes place within the perspective of workplaces studies (Luff, Hindmarsh & Heath, 2000) who’s main objective is analyzing social and cultural aspects of work activity systems, with particular attention to the role played by technology.

In the “high technology” work setting in which this research project was conducted, technology acts as both the instrument of mediation which supports the shared realization of work practices and as the “product” of that work activity. Design is a particular kind of social activity that relates the present to the future, in which the object of work is missing by defi nition because is what is going to be created. Results show that designers rely on professional practices that allow them to think and jointly construct objects, which, at that very moment, are physically and materially absent. These practices integrate resources in different semiotic fields (discourse, body, structures of the material environment), each playing a specific, contingent role. I will provide prototypical examples of these practices and I will examine in particular the specific role played by the body in the organization of the collective design action.