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Article published In:
Coordination, Collaboration and Cooperation: Interdisciplinary perspectives
Edited by Federica Amici and Lucas M. Bietti
[Interaction Studies 16:3] 2015
► pp. 495–525

Agreeing is not enough

The constructive role of miscommunication

| Center for Semiotics, Department for Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University | The Interacting Minds Centre, Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark |
| Center for Semiotics, Department for Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University | The Interacting Minds Centre, Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark |
| Center for Semiotics, Department for Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University |
| Center for Semiotics, Department for Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University | The Interacting Minds Centre, Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark |

Collaborative interaction pervades many everyday practices: work meetings, innovation and product design, education and arts. Previous studies have pointed to the central role of acknowledgement and acceptance for the success of joint action, by creating affiliation and signaling understanding. We argue that various forms of explicit miscommunication are just as critical to challenge, negotiate and integrate individual contributions in collaborative creative activities. Through qualitative microanalysis of spontaneous coordination in collective creative LEGO constructions, we individuate three interactional styles: inclusive, characterized by acknowledgment and praise; instructional, characterized by self-repair; and integrative, characterized by widespread self- and other-repair. We then investigate how different interaction styles leave distinct material traces in the resulting LEGO models. The inclusive interaction style generally results in concatenations of individual contributions with little coherence and core narrative. The instructional style produces coherent, but largely individually driven models. Finally, the integrative style generates more innovative models, synthesizing individual contributions in shared narratives or schemas.

Keywords: distributed Cognition, miscommunication, collaboration, creativity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Mechanisms for coordination in collaboration
    • 2.1.Common ground, miscommunication and repair in social interactions
    • 2.2.Material traces of interaction dynamics
  • 3.Building ideas together – materials and methods
    • 3.1.The inclusive style of interaction
      • 3.1.1Acknowledgement and praise
      • 3.1.2Resistance to other-repair
      • 3.1.3Marking and maintaining multiple individual conceptual ownerships
      • 3.1.4Material traces of the inclusive interaction style
    • 3.2.The instructional style of interaction
      • 3.2.1Initiating and maintaining a joint project with elaborate self-repair
      • 3.2.2The power of gesture and resistance of other-repair
      • 3.2.3Maintaining an individual conceptual ownership of a proposal
      • 3.2.4Material traces of the instructional style
    • 3.3.The integrative style of interaction
      • 3.3.1Distributed proposals of joint projects
      • 3.3.2Distributed epistemic processes and other-repair
      • 3.3.3Constructive consequences of other-initiation and other-completion of repair
      • 3.3.4Material traces of the integrative style
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 31 December 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.16.3.07fus
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