Mimicable embodied demonstration in a decomposed sequence: Two aspects of recipient design in professionals' video-mediated encounters

Abstract

Instructing others to do something with an object is an ordinary practice that may involve embodied demonstrations. Based on a single case analysis of a “troublemaker” example we show how the instructor decomposes the general instruction into more mechanic steps that can be mimicked by the instructee. The example is chosen because it reveals some of the taken for granted knowledge involved in accomplishing an instruction. The case is from a video mediated civil service setting in Denmark. In this setting, it is often necessary for a citizen to use a locally present object, e.g. a printer, and this may require instructions from the employee who is physically located elsewhere. We show how the instructor within a sequence decomposes the instruction from indexical references to known practices for dealing with objects to a more simplified discernible step-by-step description orchestrated by mimicable embodied demonstrations. Thus, the paper contributes with new insights about two aspects of recipient design in instructions and embodied interaction specifically linked to a video-mediated setting. The study is based on 8 h of video recordings of video-mediated encounters and applies EMCA multimodal interaction analysis.