As part of the IAS Festival of Failure, IAS Visiting FellowAssociate Professor Wyke Stommel delivers a seminar on their area of research -
In this presentation, I argue that failure is an endogenous phenomenon, something participants establish locally and collaboratively in social interaction. Failure in social interaction may consist of misunderstandings, disagreement or some other social problem, reaching the interactional level in retro-sequences (Schegloff, 2007) of ostensibly noticings, either overtly or indirectly (e.g., laughter, initiation of repair). I examine fragments of interaction between a robot, a nurse and an elderly person, in which the participants notice some environmental prompt (talk or other perceptual feature) as problematic with respect to the progressivity of the interaction and/or socially. Finding a way out of the trouble sometimes includes questionable solutions. This type of analysis provides insights in how technologies may involve failure on the microlevel of their use.
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