The situated accomplishment (aesthetics) of being a cyranoid

One aim of participatory innovation is to find new ways of engaging people in various situations that result in ideas and suggestions. For a sociotechnical system – whether the design process or its implemented result – to work smoothly (aesthetically) as a specific social order, we should understand just how it is practically accomplished. In this paper, the just-thisness of an experimental teaching situation is explored in which students were acting as cyranoids for their teacher who was located elsewhere. The situation gives us empirical materials about a relatively simple task (listening through headphones words to repeat and instructions for action), though extraordinary circumstances (mediating teaching which would normally have been relayed through video/audio). We show how the surrogate has to orient to the ongoing lecture as intelligible, to show their understanding of the situation to the absent teacher, and to recipient design the delivery to the fellow students. They have to become a porous membrane that mediates between the two sites, exactly like a user friendly interface or any fitting part of a sociotechnical system would. Thus the data shows what seen but unnoticed interactional work is required to participate, rather than to purely mimic or mediate. INTRODUCTION The topic of the present paper is how a close analysis of mediated delivery of teaching (of methods of innovation) can inform participatory design. The data comes from Robb Mitchell’s on-going work of enhancing collaboration through artistic methods which challenge and thus explore the (aesthetics of) everyday practices. Instead of just being interested in the possible feelings and other reported experiences of the participants, the aim is – with a detailed multimodal analysis of the situation – to shed light on how the surrogates managed a three-way alignment 1) to the topic (that was also delivered through power point slides), 2) to the physically absent teacher and 3) to their fellow students. These three aspects are, of course, intertwined in the task in progress. What is oriented to is 1) comprehending the content of the presentation, 2) understanding the teacher’s talk as produced either a) as repeatable or b) as an instruction to do something else, and 3) recipient designing one’s own contribution. The question then becomes: Is the surrogate participating or merely conveying the message, accomplishing (the mechanical task of) a Shannon-Weaverian conduit? What can be learnt from the situation as regards intelligent interfaces, androids, etc. is some basic features of being together with other humans: how not just social order but sociability is accomplished as an important part of human, always other-oriented, presence. The constitutive nature of ‘being there’ while ‘doing being teacher’ as a cyranoid is a task in which information delivery and affect coincide in ways the subtlety of which has to be teased out through a careful analysis. We want to show how the detailed analysis brought us to make links to approaches and concepts such as body as porous membrane or technomethodology. But first we want to turn to the necessarily interdisciplinary background theories and approaches that give us the impetus to explore the data as embodied interaction in material settings from which certain type of participation emerges due to the specific material and interactional affordances. LITERATURE AND THEORY We approach the cyranoid situation with an ethnomethodological (Garfinkel 1967) general perspective: How is social order, in this case an