Christian Greiffenhagen from the Chinese University of Hong Kong will give a guest talk to the lab.
Spotting and Dealing with Troubles in a Performance Control Room
Dealing with troubles is one of the most pervasive features in life. We 'repair' troubles that occur when talking to each other (Schegloff et al., 1977) and we 'recruit' people to help us with troubles that occur when engaged in everyday activities (Kendrick & Drew, 2016). In this paper, we investigate the organization of spotting, and dealing with, troubles in a particular setting: a control room for a performance, designed to support Blast Theory's mixed-reality game "I'd Hide You" (Reeves et al., 2016).
Control rooms are not only 'centres of coordination' (Suchman, 1997), but can also be seen as sites "designed to highlight and resolve the innumerable troublesome contingencies that may emerge unexpectedly in the course of these activities" (Koskela et al., 2013: 248). We argue that the people in the control room, 'monitors' (who are tasked with watching and assessing the live stream from runners on the street) and the 'director/stage manager' (who, in contrast to the monitors, is able to communicate with the runners on the street) distinguish between three types of troubles that they may notice while observing the runners' activities: (1) technical malfunctions, (2) executional faults, and (3) performative deficiencies. We show how both the monitors, in their initial noticings to the director/stage manager, and the director/stage manager, in their subsequent announcements to the runners on the street, orient to differences between these three types of trouble.
References
Kendrick, K. H., & Drew, P. (2016). Recruitment: Offers, requests, and the organization of assistance in interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 49(1), 1-19.
Koskela, I., Arminen, I., & Palukka, H. (2013). Centres of coordination as a nexus of aviation. In Haddington, P., Mondada, L., & Nevile, M. (Eds.), Interaction and Mobility: Language and the Body in Motion (pp. 245-276). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Reeves, S., Greiffenhagen, C. , Flintham, M., Benford, S., Adams, M., Farr, J. R., & Tandavantij, N. (2015). "I‘d Hide You": Performing live broadcasting in public. In Proceedings of CHI2015 (pp. 2573-2582). New York: ACM.
Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53(2), 361-382.
Suchman, L. (1997). Centers of coordination: A case and some themes. In Resnick, L. B., Säljö, R., Pontecorvo, C., & Burge, B. (Eds.), Discourse, Tools, and Reasoning: Essays on Situated Cognition (pp. 41-62). Berlin: Springer.