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130 Chapter 4 Design for collaboration and communication

4.4 Conceptual frameworks
A number of conceptual frameworks of the "social" have been adapted from other
disciplines, like sociology and anthropology. As with the conceptual frameworks
derived from cognitive approaches, the aim has been to provide analytic frame-
works and concepts that are more amenable to design concerns. Below, we briefly
describe two well known approaches, that have quite distinct origins and ways of
informing interaction design. These are:
Languagelaction framework
Distributed cognition
The first describes how a model of the way people communicate was used to in-
form the design of a collaborative technology. The second describes a theory that
is used primarily to analyze how people carry out their work, using a variety of
technologies.

4.4.1 The language/action framework
The basic premise of the language/action framework is that people act through lan-
guage (Winograd and Flores, 1986). It was developed to inform the design of sys-
tems to help people work more effectively through improving the way they
communicate with one another. It is based on various theories of how people use
language in their everyday activities, most notably speech act theory.
Speech act theory is concerned with the functions utterances have in conversa-
tions (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). A common function is a request that is asked indi-
rectly (known as an indirect speech act). For example, when someone says, "It's hot
in here" they may really be asking if it would be OK to open the window because
they need some fresh air. Speech acts range from formalized statements (e.g., I
hereby declare you man and wife) to everyday utterances (e.g., how about dinner?).
There are five categories of speech acts:
Assertives-commit the speaker to something being the case
Commissives--commit the speaker to some future action
Declarations-pronounce something has happened
Directives-get the listener to do something
Expressives-express a state of affairs, such as apologizing or praising someone
Each utterance can vary in its force. For example, a command to do something has
quite a different force from a polite comment about the state of affairs.
The languagelaction approach was developed further into a framework called
conversations for action (CfA). Essentially, this framework describes the se-
quence of actions that can follow from a speaker making a request of someone
else. It depicts a conversation as a kind of "dance" (see Figure 4.13) involving a se-
ries of steps that are seen as following the various speech acts. Different dance
steps ensue depending on the speech acts followed. The most straightforward kind
of dance involves progressing from state 1 through to state 5 of the conversation,