Making Space for Interaction: Architects Design Dialogues

In face-to-face conversation, the arrangement of bodies and the shared physical environment provides a rich set of resources for communication. People use the location and orientation of their gaze, heads, hands, and torsos, to help to define, amongst other things, when a conversation begins and ends, their levels of mutualengagement, their participant roles in the conversation (e.g. speaker, hearer, sideparticipant), the boundaries of each turn, and even the syntactic and semantic organization of constituents within each turn (e.g. Bavelas and Gerwing, 2007; Clark and Krych, 2004; Goodwin, 1979; Heath and Luff, 1993; Kendon, 1970; Murphy, 2005). We argue that people exploit the potential for arranging these different communicational resources in space in order to create integrated, physically manifest, conversational maps that we term interactional topologies. (Healey and Battersby, 2009; Healey and Peters, 2007). This is achieved through two things. First, the fact that different contributions and speech turns within the interaction can be indexed to distinct locations in space. Second, that the spatial arrangement of these locations can then be manipulated to represent changes in the relationship between the conversational contributions. Using excerpts from a detailed ethnographic study of architects collaborative design interactions we describe how the architects use their bodies, pens, gestures, pieces of paper and inscriptions of different kinds, to create and elaborate a series of temporary gestural maquettes.