Sylvaine Tuncer

• PhD
• Lecturer in Work Interaction & Technology at King's College London - King's Business School

Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this chapter show how transparency and trust are created through interaction in auction sales of fine art and antiques, focusing on how sources of bids are revealed. The data are video recordings of conventional auction sales in a saleroom, and recordings of ‘hybrid’ auction sales involving rem...

This chapter studies openings of interactions in immersive virtual reality (VR). Immersive VR refers to computer-generated and visually rich environments that create for the user a powerful sense of immersion. The data are video recordings of interactions collected in a multiplayer online game called Rec Room. The method is conversation analysis. T...

This study deals with turn-taking in human-robot interactions (HRI). Based on 15 sessions of video-recorded interactions between pairs of human participants and a social robot called Furhat, we explore how human participants orient to violations of the normative order of turn-taking in social interaction and how they handle those violations. As a c...

People meeting a robot for the first time do not know what it is capable of and therefore how to interact with it—what actions to produce, and how to produce them. Despite social robotics’ long-standing interest in the effects of robots’ appearance and conduct on users, and efforts to identify factors likely to improve human–robot interaction, litt...

Welfare organisations across the world are becoming more streamlined with less time for building relationships with clients, rendering non-governmental organisations increasingly important for welfare provision. In this paper, we investigate an understudied area in social work: the small talk through which volunteer organisations conduct social wor...

Our work is motivated by the idea that social robots can help inclusive processes in groups of children, focusing on the case of children who have newly arrived from a foreign country and their peers at school. Building on an initial study where we tested different robot behaviours and recorded children’s interactions mediated by a robot in a game,...

Artificial agents’ smiling behaviour is likely to influence their likeability and the quality of user experience. While studies of human interaction highlight the importance of smile dynamics, this feature is often lacking in artificial agents, presenting a design opportunity. We developed a virtual motivational therapist with four smiling behaviou...

Assistive technologies can significantly increase older adults' independent living if these technologies are designed to meet their needs and abilities. This study investigates conditions and present possibilities for assistive technology to provide physical and cognitive support to older adults in a specific domestic task, which is cooking a meal...

Using video recordings as data to study how dyads follow instructional videos to achieve practical tasks, this article focuses on how partici- pants coordinate the temporality of the video with that of their task by pausing the video. We examine three types of pausing, each display- ing participants’ online understanding of the instructions and dif...

Le développement du placement sous bracelet électronique comme peine de substitution a conduit à la création de pôles centralisateurs de surveillance, où des agents traitent systématiquement les alarmes en appelant les personnes placées sous surveillance électronique au téléphone. Après avoir situé ces alarmes dans le contexte plus large de ce disp...

While the legalisation of and policies around e-scooters remain the cause of much debate worldwide, this article sheds lights on e-scooter users’ current practices and their interactions with pedestrians in the city. Taking an ethnomethodological approach to public space and mobility, we use video recordings of e-scooter riders to show, firstly, ho...

This special issue aims to conceptualise a recurrent problem within studies on objects in interaction by bringing together a series of six empirical studies of object-centred interactions and practices. In this editorial, we first show how video-based studies of interactions in the last two decades have been hinting at our problem. Then, we describ...

This article studies a type of object-centred sequences common in biochemistry labs: scientists jointly orienting to a problematic object of work, manipulating it, inspecting it, talking about it, to see the same features of it, agreeing on their problematic character, and aiming to progress the scientific task with this object. Focusing on the ear...

Instructional videos have become an important site of everyday learning. This paper explores how these videos are used to complete practical tasks, analyzing video-recorded interactions between pairs of users. Users need to repeatedly pause their videos to be able to follow the instructions, and we document how pausing is used to coordinate and int...

The worldwide deployment of rental electric scooters has generated new opportunities for urban mobility, but also intensified conflict over public space. This article reports on an ethnographic study of both rental and privately-owned e- scooters, mapping out the main problems and potentials around this new form of ‘micro-mobility’. While it suffer...

This article builds on ethnomethodological, conversation analytic research on object transfers: how participants hand over objects to one another. By analyzing video recordings of mundane (cars) and institutional interactions (laboratories), we focus on situations where an object is central to and talked about in the joint course of action. We focu...

This article studies how co-present workers can join in a co-present interaction they were not previously involved in, thus challenging initial participants' interactional preserve. It is based on ethnographically-informed analyses of video-recorded interactions in workplaces, in English as a lingua franca and in French. Potential joiners' recurren...

In this article, we show how a common type of material environment in office organizations, namely offices with doors left open, enables and sustains the initiation of unscheduled, informal encounters. Using video recordings of naturally occurring interactions, we identify and describe a recurrent practice whereby visitors, mainly through their emb...

In this paper we report on a pervasive practice in video-mediated communication: where participants show one another one or more objects. This is a distinct activity from others considered by researchers of video-mediated technologies that focus on a face-to-face orientation, or just on the support necessary to help people to refer to objects. We f...

This article starts from the observation that social scientists using video to study naturally-occurring interactions are often questioned about the reliability of their data, by wider audiences, but also by scholars who raised concerns early on about how the recording device would modify the participants' conduct. The study uses 47 video extracts...

This article addresses informal interactions in offices by analyzing video recordings of naturally-occurring, unscheduled visits in offices. We focus on closings, and more particularly on the embodied resource of walking away by drawing heavily on a previous study. We show that fellow institutional members rely on a similar set of methods, types of...

La thèse donne à voir et à comprendre en quoi consistent les organisations et l’expérience du travail dans les organisations à partir de l’analyse d’interactions verbales, corporelles et matérielles filmées dans des bureaux. Développant une approche praxéologique originale du côté de la recherche sur les organisations, nous contribuons en outre aux...

Trying to grasp multi-activity within a praxeological perspective, we focus on a set of situations in which participants experiencing some summoning event, such as a phone ring, recognisably 'put on hold' some other involvement, and demonstrably orient towards the current relevance of two or more streams of activity. We will endeavour to show (a) t...