In the Centre for Human Interactivity, we currently work with four research themes.
Interactivity
Interactivity is the ontological substrate of sense-saturated coordination that contributes to human action and results. Interactivity is thus the flow that makes human beings come together in self-organised systems. To do so, they draw on their real-time interbodily dynamics (how facial, gestural, bodily resources are coordinated) and on their species-specific capability for meaning-making that imbues them with sociocultural resources: ways of speaking, ways of thinking, ways of seeing, etc. These resources are brought together by supra-individual systems in order to yield results.
Organisation and Sociality
Organisation and Sociality applies the theoretical notion of interactivity to larger scale processes of organising and socialising. On this view, no clear distinctions between organization and sociality can be made. This is because organising and socialising are indistinguishable in practice: they are ever ongoing processes of whole-bodied, sense-saturated interactivity.
Writing and Materiality
Writing and Materiality illuminates how bodies, tools (both material and immaterial) and material substrates constrain what people feel, think and do. On this view, cognition is distributed across individuals and time and extends into environmental structures. Of special interest to the research theme are writing processes, critical literacy and translation, as well as graphic articulation.
Cognitive events
To understand how people get things done in organisations, CHI links cognitive science and the humanities. The study of cognitive events is concerned with the moments where human beings achieve (or fail to achieve) results as they travel through an organizational problem space. For instance, when engineers come up with a solution to a technical problem, when doctors interpret a given symptom, or when managers make decisions, they change the flow of the situation. This can be studied by using Cognitive Events Analysis.