Exploring the relationship between social science and software design: theory & practice

May 23, 2011

Software as Discourse

The central perspective that underlies most of the articles featured on this blog could be summarised by the notion of ‘software as discourse’. I would like to give an overview of what this concept means to me from a theoretical point of view, on which assumptions it relies, and what it…

Pascal Belouin

May 19, 2011

Applying Conversation Analysis Concepts to Interaction Design?

Conversation Analysis could be defined as a discourse analysis method which relies on the assumption that only talk-in-interaction constitutes a valid object of analysis: relevant meaning is only created in the framework…

Pascal Belouin

May 12, 2011

A Short, Practical Example of User Experience and Interface Design for an Online Drink Ordering Service

I recently had the opportunity to write a first draft for a web application allowing office workers to order hot and cold drinks online. It’s far from…

Pascal Belouin

May 12, 2011

Towards a Critical Discursive Analysis of Neuroscientific Accounts of Addiction

I take the liberty of going off-subject a little bit by publishing this essay I wrote recently. Hope some will find it of interest!

Abstract
Neuroscientific discourses about addiction have…

Pascal Belouin

May 11, 2011

LinkedIn, Facebook and Social Identity Theory

LinkedIn recently went public. Its success makes it, with Twitter and Facebook, one of the three most popular social networking platforms.

A particular strand of Social Identity Theory, and particularly the work performed on this subject by…

Pascal Belouin

Jun 11, 2010

Reductionism and Software Engineering: Understanding the gap between interactive systems users and designers

Reductionism could be viewed as an essential theoretical component of modern natural sciences such as biology or genetics. Although reductionist…

Pascal Belouin

May 9, 2010

The Emergence of Meaning Through System Use: The central role of interaction and its implications in terms of design methodology

I have tried to show in previous posts how certain aspects of an interactive system such as how it works, what…

Pascal Belouin

Apr 26, 2010

Intertextuality and User interfaces as Relational Systems of Representations

Since I had a bit of success with my article about adopting a poststructuralist perspective towards user experience (Indeed, 2 people commented! amazing: Thank you Kshitiz and mc), I thought it would…

Pascal Belouin

Apr 25, 2010

Interactionism as a Framework for Understanding User Interaction

Interactionism is a social scientific tradition that relies on the assumption that the “real” world is actively constructed by people: It therefore views the mind primarily as a tool for solving the “pragmatic concerns”…

Pascal Belouin

Apr 19, 2010

User Experience, Poststructuralism and Phenomenology: Exploring the User’s World

I think that it would be interesting to explore the theoretical ramification of an interpretation of the notion of user experience from a ‘radically’ poststructuralist point of view, that…