Transforming Grounds

I just received the book "Interaction Rituals" by Erving Goffman in the mail. I have not really read Goffman before but found the writing to resonate with my own thinking. Even though a lot of his work is in psychology and sociology it is possible to read his work as if it is about human-computer interaction and not only human-human interaction. I found this great quote in the Introduction: "I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another. None the less, since it is individual actors who contribute the ultimate materials, it will always be reasonable to ask what general properties they must have if this sort of contribution is to be expected of them. What minimal model of the actor is needed if we are to wind him up, stick him amongst his fellows, and have an orderly traffic of behavior emerge?" (page 2). It is possib...

In 1991 I defended my PhD dissertation. The dissertation was in Swedish. In those days we (or at least I) did not write many papers or articles, we focused on the dissertation, and I did not really publish anything from my dissertation in English,. However, I published one article in the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (1991) with the title " How system designers think about design and methods--some reflections based on an interview study ". I have not seen this article in years and recently I realized I do not even have a copy. My colleague Jeff Bardzell has in some mysterious way been able to find it (the reasons for why he did this are for another post). He just sent me a pdf version of the article. Thanks Jeff! [I just got a message from my old friend and colleague Peter Axel Nielsen that all SJIS articles are available online, and so is mine...so I have changed the link. Thanks Peter Axel! ] I am quite sure I have not read the article since 1991. As us...