Architecture-for-interaction: Built, designed and furnished space for communicative purposes

Abstract

Doing space does not require a creatio ex nihilo but depends instead on manifold resources. Among these is the architecture of built, designed and furnished space. Semiotic resources such as natural language, and embodied resources such as sensory perception, body movement and spatial cognition, have received much attention in recent years. In contrast, architecture has long been neglected when it is the interactive achievement of space that is placed on the agenda. We shall begin our contribution by roughly sketching out how space and spatiality have been treated in linguistic pragmatics, and how conversation analysis and related research has coined the term “interactional space” to account for the many ways in which spatial aspects of the environment can become interactively relevant. Contrary to the notion of space as achievement, the role of space as a resource in social interaction has only recently been rediscovered. We shall, therefore, take up the concept of “architecture-for-interaction” to account for what architecture affords social interaction. It will be shown that architecture-for-interaction manifests itself in a wide range of usability cues that are systematically taken up within social interaction.