A Conceptual Application of Bakhtin’s Dialogic Discourse to Information and Interaction Design of Social Media

Abstract

Background and Purpose: This research explores how humanities – Bakhtin’s dialogical discourse – offer new insights into information and interaction design providing interdisciplinary theoretical, methodological and empirical sources for understanding design research and practices. Designing for social media is chosen as an empirical object for this research because it integrates the use of a variety of design and research approaches and their immediate implementation in social interaction. Structure: The structure of this work contains three major stages that can be described as follows: (1) Understanding Bakhtinian discourse as applied to information and interaction design. (2) Revealing and analyzing how Bakhtinian dialogic concepts contribute to design practices for social media. (3) By researching the crowd-sourced navigation social media application, Waze, we verify and validate how the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope corresponds to processing a flow of dynamic time-spatial data, to the app user experience, and to resolving the revealed problems, as well as for proposing new approaches in design practice. Results: Our work contributes to the research as the systematic application of Bakhtin’s dialogical concepts to interactive and information technology by revealing the use of these concepts as design principles and strategies for designing for social media tools and systems. We applied Bakhtinian core concepts as one dialogic coherence emphasizing its definitive social-historic dimension. We developed and implemented our interpretation of the chronotopic data analysis to the Waze app using it as our research case study. We analyzed how multiple chronotopes are realized in Waze, and how user interaction with the app through its design and deployment decisions is connected to the society-wide patterns of social practice, and yet simultaneously, also has the potential to transform existing social practice. Conclusion: Researching Waze’s design and user practices using Bakhtin’s dialogical discourse as an interpretive framework, we suggest a possible model for an alternate type of social interaction. A new form of performative practice that is actualized through technologically mediated dialogue, which could be used for further rethinking of design approaches for supporting new and emerging forms of social relations.