Embodiment at the Interface: Materialization Practices in Web Design

Inthisarticle,we describe some of the results of a research project that studied Web design practices in an Internet company. In this worksetting, technology acts as both the instrument of mediation, which supports the shared realization of workpractices, and as the product of that workactivity. For this reason, of particular importance are the social practices by which the designers(a) incrementally and jointly imagine the portal that they have to develop and(b)make visible hidden parts of technologically mediated activities supporting processes of interpretation of user-interface interactions. The results show that these design practices are essentially realized through sociomaterial arrangements of designers and technologies (talk, body, computer, whiteboard, space, etc.). Designers use these arrangements to make phenomena col- lectively visible and tangible in relation to the aims of the design activity. These re- sults show that design is acomplex, situated, and distributed phenomenon to be stud- ied as a rational and individual task whose features emerge only through detailed analysis of the group’s work practices.