Abstract
In this paper, we study the interactional organization of an instructed object exploration among sighted and visually impaired people (VIPs) in order to contribute to studies of instructional activities and the observable accomplishment of haptic perception. We do this by showing the situated, interactional, and co-operative organization of achieving object understanding. We focus on the dynamics of haptic perception as being reliant on instructions, while at the same time being an observable production that furnishes further instructions. We show the organization of visual and verbal instructions versus the touching of objects for haptic perception. Based on ethnomethodological conversation analysis of video data, we study a VIP’s haptic actions in interaction with a professional, sighted ICT consultant who provides instructions on what an object is and what it can do. We show how the instructions are sequentially adjusted to make them relevant for a simultaneous, emerging exploration in which the VIP uses their hands and fingers to perceive very specific details of the object. We argue that achieving object understanding is accomplished in and through the fine-tuned coordination of haptic exploration, both as a response to verbal instructions and also as a means of conveying perception-related actions, which the ICT uses to build new actions. The paper thus makes a case for instructed and distributed haptic perception as observable in social interaction and as a resource for building object understanding within phenomenal fields.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the professional practitioners at IBOS, Danish Institute for Blind and Visual impaired and all our devoted visually impaired participants. Data sessions were held with members of the BlindTech project group and CIRCD, Center for Interaction Research and Communication Design, contributing valuable insights to the writing of this article. In this context we would like to give a special thanks to Savi Drachmann Jakobsen for her valuable observations and preliminary cooperative work on a draft version of this paper. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and observations.
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Due, B.L., Lüchow, L. The Intelligibility of Haptic Perception in Instructional Sequences: When Visually Impaired People Achieve Object Understanding. Hum Stud 46, 163–182 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09664-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09664-8